How to Reduce Microphone Background Noise on a PC

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

Basic tips for clear audio recording

Before exploring the features of the software, you should follow some basic best practices 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 in a dedicated microphone or headset to 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 hum, 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 while you're not talking.

How to Enable Noise Reduction in Windows

Like Windows 7 before it, Windows 10 offers some built-in features

microphone options

which will help reduce background noise from the microphone. The exact options available will 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 navigate to Hardware and Sound > Sound.

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

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

After lowering the microphone boost option, try setting the microphone volume to 100. If you lower the boost setting and the microphone is quieter, increasing the volume here will make it easier for people to hear you .

After changing some settings, click “Apply” and

< p>test your microphone

again to see if that helped.

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

If there is a “Noise Cancellation” or “Noise Cancellation” option, enable it. 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 gaining more and more sophisticated noise reduction features that work on calls. Some software promises to remove background noise when recording any application on your PC. Here are some tools you can use:

GoogleMeet:

Google

added noise cancellation

How to Reduce Microphone Background Noise on a PC

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

Zoom:

Zoom incorporates 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 "Remove Persistent Background Noise", "Remove Intermittent Background Noise", and "Echo Cancellation" features. 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

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 by Krisp.ai. To enable it during voice chat, click the Noise Cancellation button at the bottom left of Discord's sidebar and enable "Noise Cancellation".

Krisp.ai

, available for free on 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 free noise cancellation every week, but you'll have to pay $3.33 a month after that.

Many other video conferencing apps have built-in noise cancellation features. , too much. You may be able to configure them from the app settings window. If you are using an old

video conferencing tool

that doesn't have built-in noise cancellation, it may be better for your organization to upgrade 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 primary mic to record your voice and a secondary mic 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 had lying around.

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