I have to work in very noisy environments such as near construction sites, near very loud music or highways, and due to the nature of my job I need to be in a lot of online meetings.
I need a clip microphone with a really good noise cancellation feature that would filter all of the noise out leaving only my voice.
Any recommendations? I’ve found Hollyland Lark M2 but it seems it lets a lot of noise through anyway.
A carbon microphone really close to your mouth might do alright, something like an aviation headset? Those are made to communicate in really loud planes, so that should do well. Doesn’t sound amazing, but quite intelligible.
Otherwise there’s stuff like RTX Voice and RNnoise if you carry a computer and not actually on the field walking around.
As blackstrat said, a commentator headset-microphone might be the thing you need if you ever have the money to spend on it. I could give you a good recommendation if you need one but the headset without anything else costs around $3k US iirc. That’s without the needed cable and DAC. Think around $5k US for the whole thing. It is really impressive because no matter how much shouting or loud noise there is right next to you, you cannot hear it if you want to filter it out by decreasing the noise gate.
Do you need to have such a high end headset-microphone? Probably not. A good microphone, adjusted audio input settings and mixing should be well enough. However, if you do feel like you really need a luxurious microphone then tell me and I’ll find the referrence for it in a bit.
So what simple but good mic would you recommend then? I just need it for teaching one-on-one online from my laptop but the environment is really loud.
And I’ve no idea about adjusted audio input settings.
While browsing a few years back, I found myself buying the Blue Snowball. While many headsets now include good microphones, I chose this one because it was (and still is) cheap and of good enough quality for regular use.
As for the input settings, that might be tough if you have no experience with it. Depending on your laptop’s OS and the wide range of software it might be tough.
Before any audio settings in place, test out your audio with:
- a microphone,
- a physical filter (some uses socks, its not recommended but it’s just to give you an idea of what it is),
- a room with as much noise reduction as possible (thick curtains/room with a good amount of furniture/sound absorbant panels, all of those can help).
Chances are, the noise will still be too much and you will want some artificial changes from softwares afterwards, but the more you dampen the noise, the less tweaks you will have to do in the software making it easier while also not ruining the audio too much with software filters.
If you’re willing to tell me what OS you will use with that laptop I can try and see what could potentially work on there without just telling you xyz software and giving you random values you have no informations on. Sometimes, simple OS audio configurations can do as much as some advertised software.
Thanks for the effort!
Why wouldn’t I just use Krispy or Neep in this case? After researching for so long I feel like that’s the only real option left.
It is a solution. I prefer to know exactly how my software is doing things and prefer to set every settings myself. While that isn’t something I recommend most do due to time constraint, I also forgot that those tools are implemented in a lot of big applications making use of video/audio calls. If it suits your needs and find no issue using them, go for it. It will indeed help tremendously. The tips to dampen the noise in the room you are in still applies. Noise cancelling tools like so need to distort the audio the more ambiant sounds there are and the volume they’re at. The louder an environment is, the more your audio will be distorted and the worst the quality will get. Nowadays, we are at a point where it shouldn’t matter too much because of how well those tools processes the audio so it should be fine. Just keep it in mind.
In the end that wasn’t all that useful but I hope you’ll manage to have good calls with an audio that fits your needs and liking.
Thank you. It’s rare to see such help from a total stranger on the web these days! I appreciate it.
My need is to use the mic with my laptop on the go wherever I am, which could be cafes or loud environments.
I’m looking for a pair of in-ear earbuds with a good mic, maybe even without much noise cancellation but a good option in general. Any recommendations?
In the case of your laptop and microphone together while being on the go, a “small” microphone and somewhat cheap would indeed be best like I said previously. If you’re outside, I wouldn’t bring some equipment that attracks too much attention to you for sure.
As for in-ear earbuds, the only good options I’m aware of do not offer any microphones. The cheapest and only ones that I can think of are the old (now retired) apple standard earbuds. However the mic isn’t that “good” per say and I doubt many places still have a stock of them.
Any specific microphones come to mind? I found the MoveMic by Shure but it’s way over my budget.
You might be best off with a lip-ribbon mic as used by commentators as that’s the kind of thing they’re designed for. On a sports broadcast the sound engineer actually mixes in some background noise from other mics because the lip-ribbon does its job so well it can sound dry. If you’re not on TV though it’ll be perfect.
Thanks but I need it to be a clip on / lavalier style.
I suspect that your success rate will be very low. Bone conduction microphones might be your best bet.
Fundamentally a microphone doesn’t know the difference between “good” sound and “bad” sound.
Most noise cancelling solutions are based around the idea that nearby sound is good and distant sound is bad.
It differentiate between the two by using the fact that it takes time for sound to travel.
If you have two identical microphones, you can set them up so that you talk directly into one, but not the other.
Any environmental sounds are picked up by both and used to cancel it - sometimes in software, other times just by reversing the microphone polarity.
Bone conduction microphones get their signal from physical contact with the audio source, your body.
Source: I’ve done a little bit of audio recording over the years in and outside of studios. My information might be incomplete and out of date. YMMV.
Also throat microphones
The human voice is a different frequency then construction noise though. Isn’t it possible to build a microphone who filters out other frequencies? Maybe even customized to the users frequency?
I know nothing about this, just asking.
Sadly not. Form an audio frequency perspective, noise is many different frequencies. The human voice pretty much matches human hearing.
A voice is not one frequency, that’s a tone. We’ve constructed systems that throw away much of the voice frequencies whilst still being understandable. Telephone calls, digital radio communication, etc.
That’s not to reduce noise, it’s to cram more calls across the same link. There’s a side effect that does reduce noise to some extent, but not significant enough to remove construction noise.
Not the microphone itself, if you want you can apply a bandpass filter for the voice ranges in the system after the microphone.
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