Check your background noise.

What "background noise" means for a call or recording

Background noise is everything your microphone picks up that isn't your voice: a fan or HVAC vent cycling on, traffic outside a window, a fridge compressor, a keyboard, another room's TV bleeding through a wall. On its own, a quiet hum is easy for your brain to tune out while you're sitting there — but a microphone doesn't filter selectively the way your ears do, so it captures that hum at roughly the same relative volume as your voice, and it rides along under every word on the other end of the call or in the recording. That's the whole reason a noise check is worth doing before something important: it tells you what the other side is actually going to hear, not what you've learned to ignore.

Typical ranges: quiet room vs. noisy room

The number this tool reports isn't a calibrated dB SPL reading — a browser has no access to a reference microphone, so there's no way to produce a lab-accurate measurement. What it gives you instead is a relative reading from your own microphone's sensitivity, which is genuinely useful for comparison: a converted closet with soft furnishings will read noticeably lower than an open room with a window facing a street, and the same room will read lower with the AC off than with it running. As a rough guide, readings that sit in the "Quiet" range describe a typical quiet home office with no obvious noise source running; "Moderate" usually still works fine for a call but a fan or hum may be faintly audible; readings that consistently land higher mean most listeners will notice room noise sitting under your voice, especially if you're using a sensitive condenser mic that amplifies everything equally.

Why the number isn't lab-accurate — and why that's fine here

A true decibel SPL measurement requires a microphone calibrated against a known reference level, plus consistent gain settings — none of which a browser can access or control. What you get here is computed from the raw signal your specific microphone happens to be sending, so the absolute number will vary between devices even in an identical room. That's a real limitation if you needed this for an acoustic certification, but for the actual question most people are asking — "is my room quiet enough to sound decent on a call" — a relative, repeatable reading from your own mic answers it just as well as a calibrated one would, since you're comparing your room to itself, not to a universal standard.

Practical ways to reduce room noise

• Turn off or move away from fans and HVAC vents during the call itself — even a few minutes without it running makes a measurable difference, and you can turn it back on right after.
• Close windows facing traffic or a street, and pick a room away from a shared wall with a noisy neighbor or appliance if you have the choice.
• Soften hard, flat surfaces — bare desks, windows, and empty walls near the mic reflect your own voice back into the capsule as echo or reverb; a rug, curtains, or even a couple of cushions cut this down quickly.
• Move the mic closer to your mouth so you can lower the input gain — a lower gain setting picks up less of the room along with your voice.

When noise-cancellation software helps — and when it can't

Software noise suppression (built into Zoom, Teams, Discord, and OS-level tools like Windows Voice Focus or macOS's Voice Isolation) is genuinely effective at removing steady, predictable noise — a fan, a hum, distant traffic — because it can learn what "not voice" sounds like and subtract it in real time. What it can't do is fix a physically loud room: if your ambient level is high enough that it's competing with your voice rather than sitting quietly underneath it, aggressive suppression starts cutting into your actual speech too, making you sound processed, robotic, or clipped. Software is a genuine improvement layered on a decent room, not a replacement for one — check the room first with the tool above, then let noise cancellation handle whatever's left. If the input itself still sounds weak after that, our full microphone test and the permission diagnostic are good next stops.