Does your sound card have noise removal option? That might work?

It's a Realtek ALC892. All it has is microphone boost multipliers and the obvious volume control. I don't have a sound card nor do I know of any that can perform noise removal in hardware or somehow amplify the gain of a microphone without increasing noise.

This is what my PC at work shows. Noise suppression button.

That's a software driver effect. I'm on Linux mind you, I just have direct access to the audio outputs and inputs. Nothing fancy whatsoever.

EDIT: Said effects will actually muffled and grumble my voice if the microphone picks up more noise than real audio...

maybe you have to place the microphone more near to your mouth, and more away from speakers or load pc fans.

Sammy wrote:

maybe you have to place the microphone more near to your mouth, and more away from speakers or load pc fans.

I've even screamed my lungs out infront of my old microphone and it barely picked up anything... And I always keep the microphone close enough to talk into without breathing on it. My computer is positioned in such a way the fan wont disturb the input, that and the fan is really quiet. (It's just the CPU cooler fan, I don't have any fans mounted to my case)

And this is besides the point, I'm wondering if anyone here would recommend a good decent microphone and anything I should know to make the most out of a microphone quality wise.

At my work we ordered Buddy microphones from Amazon. They have been very well received by the users in our operational room and they have good value for their price.

http://www.buddymicrophones.com/

They have both USB and jack 3.5mm models. We use the USB ones and they work very well.

On the mechanical side, I would make sure to get one that has a baffle on the mike element. You can see that the Buddy mic suggested by Vetz has such a baffle in the form of a foam ball on the mic element.

Unfortunately, all of the mics that came with any Creative cards that I purchased in the past had no baffle. I always make a point to save the foam baffle from worn out mic/headphone devices for use as replacements or to put on mics that don't come with a baffle.

I'll look into these, thanks for the suggestion vetz!

And yeah I kinda figured a baffle is a major player, though I'm also wondering how microphone sensitivity itself actually works. I want to keep the internal volume levels for the microphone on the soundchip level at 0.0 dB if I can help it and still be audible.

The important thing to ask is what you want your microphone for specifically, because there's not many decent "universal" mics which would suffice for every single situation you can think of.

One major point I can confirm right now though is that unless you have a decent, dedicated audio card, DO NOT buy a phono-jack mic for use with your computer. There's every possibility you will get huge amounts of noise on the mic line as the built-in audio chipsets on most motherboards put audio output first and audio input second in terms of quality. :P

Don't be afraid of USB if you intend to use the mic primarily with a computer. Maybe back in the days before USB 3.0 a USB mic would be a bad idea, but you can buy some very decent USB mics now. I'm using a Blue Yeti mic which normally sells for up to $200 USD, but can be had for closer to $100 if you shop around. (I got mine for $90 thanks to price matching policies at a local electronics store!)

You'll probably also want to invest in a stand and/or a pop filter, again depending on what you intend to use the mic for. Both are relatively inexpensive.

Try to avoid headset mics or collar mics unless you have a very good reason to use them. They typically don't have as large of a receiving surface and thus can't produce the same range of frequencies of a larger mic at the same price point.

Other than that, the best thing to do is just look around online and read reviews. ;)

Well I need a microphone to do voice acting with (namely for my Unreal1 projects), and to also play nice with the voice mask I'm working on engineering. I don't want the voice mask to inadvertently sound terrible due to noise reception screwing with it. I've wanted to (for some reason) talk to my viewers whenever I'm streaming something and I like to not sound like a human being when I do.

EDIT: Pressed the wrong button again... And the reason I avoid USB microphone is because I already have a audio device, I rather just tap into the jack directly rather than mess with two different audio devices on the system. Latency is also my primary concern.

DracoNihil wrote:

Well I need a microphone to do voice acting with (namely for my Unreal1 projects), and to also play nice with the voice mask I'm working on engineering. I don't want the voice mask to inadvertently sound terrible due to noise reception screwing with it. I've wanted to (for some reason) talk to my viewers whenever I'm streaming something and I like to not sound like a human being when I do.

EDIT: Pressed the wrong button again... And the reason I avoid USB microphone is because I already have a audio device, I rather just tap into the jack directly rather than mess with two different audio devices on the system. Latency is also my primary concern.

If you get a good USB mic, latency will be a non-issue. The latency on my mic is definitely only a fraction of a second, best guess around 0.1 or 0.2 seconds.

But yeah, so long as you have an actual audio card and aren't relying on a built-in audio chipset you can go with a phono-jack mic without issues.

As for what you want the mic for, avoid omni-directional or stereo. Get yourself a mic designed specifically for vocal performances, or one which has the option to switch to a mono-directional mode so you only get recording from one direction: the direction you're speaking from. Noise however is always an issue though. The best way to minimize noise is to ensure minimal range between the mic and the person speaking and to ensure as few devices in the area are running as possible. For non-live performance, you can also record a moment of silence to act as a filter later on to perform a "noise removal" operation on the recorded waveform, which is what I do for my show. For live performance, having a limiter in place to enable capture above a certain dB level and disable capture below a certain dB level is a good way to eliminate noise during silent moments, which is what I do for my live streams as Open Broadcaster (the live streaming software I use) has this feature built-in.

I'm still reading up into SoX, PulseAudio and LADSPA I've done noise gating before but never in real time. The feature in OBS wouldn't really work out well for me for what it is at the base.

I'm pretty sure I can use SoX to setup a noise gate like filter in addition to my voice mask that I plan to make.

As for sound card, I've yet to get a dedicated soundcard. I want to avoid Creative like the plague for obvious reasons but this one particular well regarded card from M-AUDIO seems to have vanished without a trace. I have a PCIe 1x slot and three traditional PCI slots. I'm not sure what to go for a decent audio card that isn't Creative based. And this is all coming from a Linux user who doesn't want to switch to windows ever again.

I get good results with the headset microphone on my Turtle Beach analog headset. Surprisingly high quality, probably helped out by the fact that it's close to my face and has a foam cover.

I also have a USB condenser mic, but that one is harder to keep the misc sounds from picking up.

DracoNihil wrote:

I want to avoid Creative like the plague for obvious reasons

I'm... not familiar with these reasons. Then again, the last time I bought a Creative sound card was in 2001. :P

My reasoning behind avoiding Creative is because their driver support is virtually non-existent on Linux (even Windows, no Daniel K's driver doesn't count either), and even if I went with a EMU based chipset the hardware mixing would be moot due to PulseAudio being the predominate thing on every distro for sound, and it is a hell of a headache and dozens of hacks to remove PulseAudio and use ALSA directly due to everything being compiled to use PulseAudio rather than ALSA. That and their "latest thing" is so gimmicky I rather not even bother.

+1 for Blue Yeti.

Best mic for the money by far. Even for a twit like me, with a good face for radio and a good voice for newspaper. 😜

3.5mm microphones are going to give you lackluster results without an external pre-amp. Even if they use the small bias voltage from the sound card, the dynamic range is generally going to be poor.

Microphone type can be a personal preference, from the desk stand, through tie clip to what I would expect to be best, a headset boom mic (don't have to use the headset part) - the mic is set a constant distance from you, even if you move your head.

Unless you're using this microphone for professional endeavors, don't spend too much.

The law of diminishing returns is in full effect with microphones, as in most of the technology world.