How to Reduce Background Noise on Your Microphone

Last updated 8 August 2026 — MicTest.live

Background noise is the most common complaint about home audio, and the most common response — turning on noise suppression — is the least effective fix available. Software removes noise after it has been captured, and it always removes some of your voice along with it. Everything you do before capture is free.

Here are the fixes in order of how much difference they make, from most to least.

1. Get closer to the microphone

This one change beats everything else combined, and it costs nothing.

Sound pressure falls with distance, but the background noise in your room does not — it is roughly the same everywhere. So moving from 60 cm to 20 cm makes your voice roughly nine times stronger while the room noise stays exactly where it was. The ratio between them improves dramatically.

Every broadcaster works close to the microphone for exactly this reason. Aim for 15–30 cm for a desktop microphone; a headset boom should sit at the corner of your mouth. Then lower the gain to compensate, and the noise comes down with it.

2. Deal with the loudest noise source

Spend one minute listening to your room with your eyes closed. Most people are surprised. The usual suspects, in rough order of how often they turn up: a desktop computer's fans, air conditioning or heating, a fridge in an adjoining room, traffic through a single-glazed window, and a mechanical keyboard directly under the microphone.

Each has an obvious fix that is more effective than any processing. Move the computer off the desk or under it. Turn the air conditioning off for the duration of the call. Close the window. Move the microphone off the desk surface onto a boom arm so keystrokes are not transmitted through the wood.

3. Use the microphone's directionality

Most microphones are directional, and the direction is not always what people assume.

A cardioid pattern — the most common — is most sensitive at the front, less at the sides, and least directly behind. Point the back of the microphone at your noise source, not the side. If your computer sits to your left and you are facing the microphone, rotating the whole setup so the computer is behind the microphone can drop its noise noticeably.

Multi-pattern microphones such as the Blue Yeti make this worse before better: many people leave them in omnidirectional mode, which picks up equally from all directions, when cardioid would reject most of the room. Check the pattern switch — it is often the single biggest improvement available on that microphone.

4. Treat the reflections

Room echo is not exactly noise, but it degrades a recording in a similar way, making a voice sound distant and hollow. It comes from your voice bouncing off hard flat surfaces and arriving at the microphone a few milliseconds late.

You do not need acoustic panels. Curtains, a rug, a bookcase with uneven contents, cushions and a duvet all absorb high frequencies effectively. The classic emergency fix — recording in a wardrobe surrounded by clothes — works precisely because it is a room with no reflective surfaces left.

The one surface people forget is the desk itself. A hard desk directly under the microphone reflects your voice straight back up into it. A folded towel or a desk mat under the microphone removes that reflection for nothing.

5. Then, and only then, use software

With the physical work done, software noise suppression has far less to remove and therefore damages your voice far less. This ordering matters: suppression applied to a clean signal is nearly transparent, while suppression applied to a noisy one is audible and unpleasant.

Be aware of what it costs. Aggressive suppression classifies quiet speech as noise and removes it, which listeners hear as you cutting in and out. It also strips the natural room tone entirely, which can make a voice sound oddly disembodied. If people tell you that you keep dropping mid-sentence, turn the suppression down before anything else.

A word on noise gates

A noise gate is different from noise suppression. It simply mutes the signal whenever it falls below a threshold, so silence is genuinely silent and noise only appears while you are speaking.

Gates are effective for constant hiss and terrible for anything else. Set the threshold too high and quiet words are cut off; set it too low and the gate does nothing. And because they open and close abruptly, the noise floor appears and disappears with your voice, which is more noticeable than steady noise would have been. Use a gate only when the noise is well below your voice and you speak in clear separated phrases.

What to check right now

Open the microphone test and watch the meter while you stay completely silent. Whatever the meter reads is your noise floor. Below about −55 dB you have nothing to worry about. Around −40 dB you will hear it in a quiet recording. Above −30 dB it will be obvious to everyone on a call.

Then record five seconds, half silence and half speech, and listen with headphones. That comparison tells you more in ten seconds than any specification sheet.

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