How to Reduce Microphone Background Noise on a PC

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Whether you're video conferencing with colleagues, chatting with friends, or recording content for public consumption, the quality of the audio recording is always important. Here's how to get clear, crisp audio and minimize noise background on a Windows PC.

Basic tips for clear audio recording

Before diving into the features of the software, there are a few basic best practices you should follow for clearer audio recording. Here are some quick tips:

Wear Headphones:

If your microphone picks up noise from your speakers, put on headphones to eliminate the echo.

Use a dedicated microphone or headset:

Many laptops have very poor quality built-in microphones. Sure, they work, but that's about all that can be said for them. Try plugging a dedicated microphone or headset into your PC.

Eliminate or move away from background noise:

Close windows, move away from air vents, move to less noisy rooms, close apps that make your laptop fans whir, move your microphone away from your mouth so other people can't hear your breathing and generally think about how you can avoid noises. Consider swapping this noisy

mechanical keyboard

for something quieter during calls. Also, consider muting yourself during the call when you're not talking.

How to Enable Noise Reduction in Windows

Like Windows 7 before it, Windows 10 offers

microphone options

this will help with background noise from the microphone. The exact options available depend on your PC's audio hardware and your manufacturer's audio drivers.

These options are found in the traditional Control Panel. They are not available in the new Settings app. To find them,

open the Control Panel from the Start menu

and head to Hardware and Sound > Sound.

Click on the "Recording" tab in the Sound window, select your microphone and click on "Properties".

Click on the "Levels" tab. If you're dealing with background noise, try reducing the Microphone Boost option, perhaps to +10.0dB instead of +20.dB. This makes the microphone louder. sensitive, which means it will hear you more easily, but it will also pick up more background noise.

After reducing the microphone boost option, try adjusting the microphone volume down to 100. If you reduce the boost setting and the microphone is quieter, increasing the volume here will allow people to hear you easier.

After changing some settings, click “Apply” and

test your mic

again to see if that helped matters.

Finally, click on the "Enhancements" tab. This tab may not be available, depending on your PC's audio hardware and drivers.

If there is a “Noise Suppression” or “Noise Suppression” option, turn it on. Other options here can also help reduce background noise. For example, on the PC we tested it on, there was an “Acoustic Echo Cancellation” option that would help reduce the echo caused by the speakers if you're not wearing headphones.

Click "OK" to save your changes and close the window.

How to Configure and Test Microphones in Windows 10

Use noise reduction software or features

Popular communication tools are getting more and more sophisticated noise canceling features that work on calls. Some software promises to remove background noise while recording any application on your PC. Here are some tools which you can use:

GoogleMeet:

Google

How to Reduce Microphone Background Noise on a PC

added noise cancellation

at GoogleMeet on April 22, 2020. GoogleMeet will automatically filter out background noise.

Zoom:

Zoom has built-in background noise suppression which is enabled by default. To check these options, open Zoom's settings window from its menu, select "Audio" from the sidebar and click the "Advanced" button. You will see the features “Remove Persistent Background Noise”, “Remove Intermittent Background Noise” and “Echo Cancellation”. These audio processing features are all set to “Auto” by default, but you can turn them off or adjust them to be more or less aggressive.

NVIDIA RTX Voice:

With the

NVIDIA RTX Voice

app installed, you can enable a “Remove Background Noise” feature that uses

machine learning

and the power of an NVIDIA GPU to suppress background noise from your microphone in any application on your system. According to NVIDIA, this software only works on systems with NVIDIA RTX GPUs. However,

Ars Technica Reports

that it can also run on PCs with older NVIDIA graphics hardware.

Discord:

Discord now has a built-in noise canceling feature from Krisp.ai. To enable it during voice chat, click the Noise Canceling button at the bottom left of Discord's sidebar and enable “Noise Canceling” .

Krisp.ai

, available for free in Discord, also has a software product that can enable noise cancellation in any app, like NVIDIA's RTX Voice software, but for PCs without any. It has a free tier that offers 120 minutes of noise cancellation. noise cancellation for free every week, but you'll have to pay $3.33 a month after that.

Many other video conferencing apps also have built-in noise cancellation features. You may be able to configure these from the app's settings window. If you're using an older

video conferencing tool

that doesn't have built-in noise cancellation, your organization might be better off upgrading to a modern solution that does.

Consider a noise-canceling microphone

If nothing else works well, you may need a better microphone. Some microphones are designed to filter or reduce ambient noise. For example, they may have two built-in microphones: a main mic to record your voice and a secondary microphone to record ambient noise. They can then filter out ambient noise. They are often marketed as "noise reduction microphones".

Even if you don't pick up a microphone specifically designed for it, a higher quality microphone can be a big improvement in audio quality over a built-in laptop microphone or an old headset you were lying around.

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