Free tool
Mic noise floor test
Your noise floor is what your microphone picks up when you are not talking: the fans, the hiss, the hum. This tool measures it in five seconds and gives you an honest dBFS number, right in your browser.
Noise floor meter
Measure your room in five seconds
Records 5 seconds of raw mic input and reports peak, noise floor, clipping, and tonal shape. Speak normally for the first couple seconds, then stay quiet so we can read your noise floor.
How the measurement works
The meter samples your raw mic signal for five seconds, computes the loudness (RMS) of each frame, then averages the quietest 25% of frames. That way it still reads your true floor even if you talk partway through the test, because the silent stretches are what get measured. Browser echo cancellation, noise suppression, and auto gain control are all explicitly disabled, so you see your actual signal, not a browser-cleaned version of it.
One honest caveat: this measures the browser's capture path, not your audio driver's. It is the same signal, but the reading is dBFS, which is relative to digital full scale, so it depends on your input gain. Turn your gain down and the floor number drops too, along with your voice. What matters is the gap between the two, which is why the tool also reports dynamic range.
What the numbers mean
Studio-quiet. Your room and signal chain are essentially silent under your voice. Nothing to fix.
Typical for a clean, untreated room. Listeners will not notice it during normal speech. A gate handles the rest.
Room noise is audible in quiet moments: between sentences, during pauses. Worth fixing before it reaches a stream or recording.
Strong room noise or hum, audible even under speech. Usually gain set too hot, a loud fan close to the mic, or electrical noise on the line.
These are the exact bands the meter above uses to grade your reading, so the tool and this table always agree. They assume your gain is set so normal speech peaks somewhere sensible, not near the ceiling and not whisper-quiet, which is why the dynamic range figure matters as much as the floor itself.
What raises a floor: input gain set too hot is the most common cause, because it amplifies the room along with your voice. After that it is physical noise (PC fans, air conditioning, traffic), cheap USB power delivering hiss or whine into the signal, and ground hum. Moving the mic closer to your mouth and pulling the gain down is the single highest-value change, since it improves the voice-to-room ratio at the source.
What software can do: two tools cover the two halves of the problem. A noise gate silences the gaps between words but leaves the hiss under your speech, because it only judges loudness. AI noise suppression removes the steady hiss everywhere, including under your words, but does nothing extra for the gaps. Together they cover both. See what noise suppression actually does for how the suppression half works.
Fixing a high floor
Start physical: close the gap between your mouth and the mic, lower the input gain, and point the mic away from the loudest thing in the room. Every dB you remove at the source is a dB no software has to guess about. If the floor is a whine or hum rather than broadband hiss, suspect the USB port or cable before the room; a different port, ideally not on a hub, often fixes it.
Then let software take the rest. The full step-by-step, from gain staging to setting a gate threshold that sits above your measured floor, is in how to reduce background noise on your mic. The number this tool just gave you is the input to that guide: a gate threshold works when it sits a few dB above your real floor, and now you know what your real floor is.
Drop your floor in real time
patchd is a Windows audio mixer with a real effects rack on every channel, with the essentials free: noise gate, AI noise suppression, EQ, and more. Join the waitlist to be the first to know when it ships.