Audio Fixes That Cost Nothing

Writing the audio pages on this site produced a pattern worth collecting. Page after page, the first recommendation cost nothing — and because those paragraphs sit above the products, they are the easiest part of any page to skim.

So here they are on their own. The organising principle: it must cost nothing, take under ten minutes, and already appear on this site as the step before a purchase. Anything needing a product is excluded by definition.

A note on this collection: every item here rests on the mechanism described in the page it comes from rather than on comparisons made here. See how we test.

Move the microphone closer

The one that outperforms everything sold for the problem.

It does not reduce the room's contribution at all. It raises your direct voice relative to that contribution, and the ratio between the two is what the listener actually hears. Halving the distance changes that ratio more than any panel, any filter, any processing.

It also lets you lower the gain, which lowers everything that is not your voice — so one adjustment improves both halves of the problem at once.

The mechanism, including the tonal change that comes with it, is in microphone position and the proximity effect.

Set the gain to where it should be, not to where it is loud

Most microphone problems that get described as "quiet" or "noisy" are a level problem.

Too little gain means the quiet parts of your voice sit near the noise floor and everything gets amplified later, noise included. Too much means the loud parts clip, which no processing recovers.

The target is a recording that peaks well below the top with room to spare, set once, and then left alone. It is free, it takes two minutes, and it removes a whole class of symptoms people buy hardware to solve — gain staging without clipping.

Get the tweeters to ear height

Desk speakers almost always sit below the desk edge and fire at your chest.

High frequencies are directional — they beam forward and fall away off-axis — so a speaker aimed at your torso delivers its bass fully and its treble partially. That is heard as dull, and it gets blamed on the speakers.

Raising them, or simply tilting them upward on anything to hand, is the largest single change available on a typical desk. Then aim each one at your head so you and the pair form a rough triangle, which is what produces a centre image rather than two separate boxes — speaker placement on a desk.

Pull the speakers away from the wall

A nearby boundary reflects low frequencies back in phase, and the bass rises. In a corner, two surfaces do it at once.

The result is impressive for about a day and muddy after that. Moving them forward a few centimetres removes it, costs nothing, and is the second-largest free change after height.

Break the short reflection paths with things you own

Not all surfaces matter equally. What matters is the ones giving a short path from your mouth to a surface and back to the microphone — the desk itself, the wall behind the screen, the nearest side wall.

Something soft on the desk between you and the microphone does more than the same material on a distant wall. Closed curtains, a rug, a bookcase with books at uneven depths — all free if they are already in the house, and all more effective than a poster-thin fabric panel.

The full ordering, and where treatment genuinely earns its place, is in reducing echo on calls without buying panels.

Point the microphone away from the noise, not just toward you

A directional microphone rejects what is behind it, which makes the arrangement a choice rather than an accident.

The useful version: microphone facing you, with something absorbent beyond you, and the bare wall behind the microphone rather than behind you. Turning the desk round occasionally fixes a call quality problem outright.

The same principle handles the keyboard — moving it out of the microphone's pickup pattern does more than any mount, and it is covered in stopping keyboard noise reaching your mic.

Find a ground loop by unplugging things

A hum that appears when two powered devices are connected is diagnosable for nothing.

Unplug one device at a time and listen. The hum that stops when a particular connection is broken has named its own cause, and knowing whether it is the audio interface, the screen or the amplifier decides whether the fix is a different socket, a different cable route, or a purchase.

Doing that before buying anything is the whole argument of ground loops and why speakers hum.

Turn sidetone on

Free in most headset software and most conferencing applications, and it changes how you speak.

Without hearing yourself, closed-back headphones make you raise your voice without noticing — which is tiring for you and unpleasant for everyone else. Sidetone feeds a little of your own microphone back to your ears and the volume self-corrects.

Why it exists and what it is called in different places is in sidetone and hearing your own voice.

Check what your mute button actually mutes

Not a sound quality fix, and it belongs here because it costs nothing and the failure is expensive.

Hardware mute, application mute and system mute are three different things, and which one a given button operates is not always obvious. The way to know is to test it deliberately once, rather than to assume during a call.

Mute that actually mutes sets out how to check.

Use software noise suppression lightly, and last

Suppression is genuinely good at steady noise — a fan, a hum. It is working much harder against reverberation, which is your own voice arriving late.

Pushed hard enough to remove that, it starts removing parts of your voice too, and the result is the processed, underwater quality everyone recognises. Doing the physical fixes first means you can leave it on a low setting, which is where it does its best work.

What was deliberately left out

Anything requiring a purchase, obviously. But also two categories that look like fixes and are not.

Equaliser presets, room correction and headphone tuning profiles. These change taste rather than mechanism. They can be worth having, and they are not the answer to a microphone in the wrong place.

Buying a better microphone into an untreated room. A more sensitive one picks up more of the room for the same voice, which is why the studio-grade upgrade often sounds worse — the argument in dynamic versus condenser.