How to Reduce Background Noise on Your Mic

Most microphone background noise is solved by four things, in order of importance: getting the mic close to your mouth and turning the gain down, aiming its pickup pattern away from noise sources, adding a noise gate to cut the silence between words, and finally running one good noise-suppression tool for the steady hum that is left. The mistake almost everyone makes is reaching for a suppression plugin first and skipping the free, physical fixes that do more — a well-placed mic barely needs software help. Understanding the difference between a gate and suppression is the key to layering them without turning your voice into a robotic mess.

Background noise on a mic — a fan, an air conditioner, a mechanical keyboard, an echoey room, housemates in the next room — is one of the most common complaints in voice chat and streaming, and it is very fixable. But the tools people reach for are often the wrong ones for the noise they have, or applied so aggressively that the cure is worse than the disease. So before touching any setting, it is worth being clear on the two different tools that get confused constantly, because picking the right one for the right noise is half the battle.

Two different tools: noise gate vs noise suppression

These sound similar and do completely different jobs. Using the wrong one, or expecting one to do the other's work, is why so many setups sound bad.

A noise gate

A noise gate is a volume threshold. When the incoming sound is quieter than the threshold you set, the gate closes and mutes the mic entirely; when you speak and cross the threshold, it opens and lets your voice through. Its whole job is to cut out the background between your words — the room goes silent when you are not talking. What a gate does not do is clean the noise while you are speaking; the moment the gate is open, the fan hum comes through underneath your voice. Set the threshold too high and it clips the start and end of quiet words, or cuts out when you speak softly; too low and it never closes. A gate is excellent for killing the noise in the gaps and nearly useless for the noise on top of your voice.

Noise suppression

Noise suppression(sometimes called noise reduction or noise removal) actively analyses the sound and strips out steady, continuous background — the constant whir of a fan, the drone of an AC unit, the hiss of a cheap mic — while you are talking, leaving your voice on top. Modern versions use trained models to separate speech from noise remarkably well. This is the tool for the noise that a gate cannot touch: the stuff you hear underneath your words. The trade-off is that heavy suppression can make your voice sound processed, watery or robotic, and can swallow quiet consonants, so more is not better. In practice you use both: a gate for the gaps, gentle suppression for the constant hum during speech.

Fix it at the source first: placement and gain

Before any software, this is where the biggest, most honest gains are, and it costs nothing. The goal is a strong ratio of your voice to the background— the louder your voice is relative to the room at the microphone, the less work everything downstream has to do.

• Get the mic close. Sound falls off sharply with distance, so a mic a few inches from your mouth captures a voice that dwarfs the room, while a mic across the desk captures a thin voice swimming in noise. Closer is the single most effective change you can make.
• Turn the gain down. With the mic close, you can lower the input gain so it is not amplifying the whole room to hear you. High gain on a distant mic is a recipe for picking up everything; low gain on a close mic captures a clean, strong voice. Set gain so your normal speaking voice is healthy without cranking it to hear a whisper.
• Mind plosives and handling.Position the mic slightly off-axis (just off to the side of straight-on) and use a pop filter to tame the bursts on “p” and “b” sounds, and put the mic on a stand or arm rather than the desk so keyboard thumps do not travel through the surface into it.

Doing this alone often reduces perceived background noise more than any plugin, and it makes every software step afterward gentler and cleaner. If you are setting a mic up from scratch, our gaming microphone setup guide walks the whole configuration; this page is specifically about the noise once it is running.

Use your mic's pickup pattern

Most standalone gaming and streaming mics use a cardioid pickup pattern, which is directional: it is most sensitive to sound coming from the front and actively rejects sound from the rear. That is a free noise-reduction tool if you use it deliberately. Point the front of the mic at your mouth and arrange your setup so the noise sources — a desktop PC's fans, an AC unit, a window onto a busy street — are behind the microphone, in the direction it rejects, rather than in front of it. A common mistake is aiming a cardioid mic so its rejecting rear points at a wall and its sensitive front points straight at the noisy PC tower. Turn the arrangement around so the pattern works for you. Knowing which end of the mic is the front, and which axis it rejects, is worth more than an extra plugin.

The software layer, used sparingly

With placement and pattern sorted, software cleans up the remainder. There are several good options, and you generally want one doing the heavy lifting, not a stack of them fighting each other:

• NVIDIA Broadcast / RTX Voice. On a GeForce RTX graphics card, NVIDIA Broadcast uses the GPU to run AI noise removal that is genuinely impressive at erasing steady background — fans, keyboards, even a fair bit of room chatter — while keeping your voice intact. It runs as a virtual microphone you select in your game or chat app. It is one of the strongest options if you have the hardware for it.
• Krisp and similar services. Krisp is a cross-platform noise-suppression tool that works without a specific GPU, sitting between your mic and your apps as a filtered virtual device.
• Discord's built-in suppression.Discord ships noise suppression right in its voice settings (its “Noise Suppression” toggle), so for voice chat you may not need anything external at all — turn it on and test.
• OBS filters for streaming. If you stream, OBS has built-in Noise Suppressionand Noise Gatefilters you can add to the mic source and tune yourself — the gate for the gaps, suppression for the hum — which gives you the most control over the final sound.

Whichever you pick, resist the urge to stack multiple suppressors; two aggressive filters in series is the fastest way to a watery, robotic voice. Start gentle, listen back to a recording of yourself, and add only as much as the noise actually requires.

Taming the room

One honest distinction to close on: software suppression and gates deal with noise, but they do not fix echo and reverbfrom a bare, hard-surfaced room, which is a separate problem of sound bouncing off walls back into the mic. The cure for that is physical — soft furnishings, rugs, curtains, a bookshelf, anything that absorbs reflections — plus, again, getting the mic close so it hears more of you and less of the room. And the most effective “noise reduction” of all is simply removing the source where you can: closing a window, moving the PC tower off the desk, or picking a quieter fan curve. Software is the finishing polish, not the foundation.

The honest summary

Work from the source outward. Get the mic close and drop the gain, because a strong voice-to-noise ratio does more than any plugin. Aim the cardioid pattern so noise sits behind the mic. Add a noise gate to silence the gaps between words, and one good suppression tool — NVIDIA Broadcast, Krisp, Discord's toggle, or OBS filters — to handle the steady hum while you talk, applied gently. Treat the room for echo separately, and remove noise sources where you can. Layer them in that order and almost any microphone, including a modest one, can sound clean and clear. If you are still choosing the mic itself, our best microphone for gaming roundup covers the options, and if the problem is that your headset mic produces no sound or is broken rather than noisy, that is a different fix in our gaming headset mic not working guide. Crackle and static on what you hear is different again — our headset crackling fix handles that side.