These days, with a lot of emphasis being placed on working and studying from home, people are turning to voice and video conferences to conduct meetings, classes, lessons, group projects, and more. Now, we’re sure that some of you might have come across instances where someone might have said you sound too loud or too soft.
If you find yourself in that situation, obviously you need to change your microphone’s settings, and here’s how you can do that in a few quick and easy steps.
Volume VS Gain
First of, before we dive into the guide, it needs to be understood that there is a difference between volume and gain. When your speakers sound too soft, you might turn up the volume which increases the loudness. It might be almost intuitive to do the same with microphones, but when it comes to microphones, there is a difference.
The “loudness” of a microphone is usually referred to as gain, which is basically the sensitivity of your microphone and how much of your voice it amplifies. This means that turning up the input levels or gain on your microphone could make you sound louder, but it also means that you might need to either step back a bit from your microphone or lower your speaking tone.
If you typically place your microphone right next to your mouth, you can consider lowering the gain because since it’s closer to you, it will be able to pick up your voice much easily compared to if the microphone was placed a foot away from your mouth.
How To Adjust Microphone Levels In Windows 10
- In your system tray located at the bottom right corner of your screen, right-click the icon that looks like a speaker and select “Open Sound settings”
- Scroll down to Input and make sure your microphone is selected and click “Device properties”. This is important because you can have multiple sources of input, like if you’re using a laptop it could have selected your laptop’s built-in microphone. If you have a webcam, it might select your webcam, so choose the microphone that you actually want to configure
- Drag the slider under “Volume” to the level that you want. You can test the strength of your microphone by clicking the “Start test” button and speaking in your normal voice. When you’re done, click “Stop test” and it will show you the highest record volume. This can be used to gauge how high of an input gain you want to set or cap it at.
We should note that you do not always want to set your microphone levels to the highest. This is because, depending on the quality of the microphone you’re using, setting it to the max has the potential to cause distortion.
Also, if you’re using external speakers while using your microphone, higher input levels means that it will more easily pickup on those background noises which can create unnecessary feedback and can be annoying to others who are listening in.
Filed in . Read more about Microphones, Microsoft, Windows and Windows 10.