I’ve recently bought A Samson CO1U USB microphone thinking it would be crystal clear quality for my podcast and sorts, what I found was really disappointing, It has this really loud white noise when it records. I really need some help with this because it’s hindering my podcast and making it sound “Scruffy”, so to speak. Don’t get me wrong, if you can try to ignore the noise it’s all that I was looking for, but the white noise makes it really hard to listen to. I’ve attached a file of the noise, just to clarify what it is.
Is there anyway to ever come this white noise problem, say a mains powered USB hub, or an external sound card? Note: I haven’t boosted the sound on it, the white noise is always there
The noise level is about -61 dB peak, -68 dB rms.
That is not a excessive amount of noise as long as your audio signal is reasonably high.
If you are getting a peak level in your voice recording of around -6 dB then the Noise Removal effect should be able to do a good job at reducing the noise level further.
Note that headphones, and particularly “ear bud” headphones have a tendency to exaggerate hiss.
To completely eliminate hiss between words you could use a Noise Gate effect, but be aware that total silence between words can sound sterile and unnatural.
I have tried that and it does what, but only to a certain extent:/ It does silence the white noise when I’m not talking, but as I talk again, the hissing can be heard in the background, being even more irritant than before. Sorry if I sound pushy, it’s just that a spent quite a bit of money on this product for it to just be sold on eBay
Audacity noise reduction will reduce the noise when you are talking, use as little as possible (~10dB) as it can add digital processing artifacts to the recording … http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Noise_Removal
You could check that no other channels are being recorded by Audacity other than the USB mic,
as even an unused channel could contribute hiss noise, i.e. check the USB mic alone is responsible for the noise,
However this review says noise is noticeable on that USB mic …
there’s a lot of noise from the built-in preamp chip if you’re pushing the gain really high.
What worked for me with this problem, was to right click on the speaker icon on my taskbar, the bottom right hand side of the screen (windows 8.1) then click on recording devices, right click on microphone, go to properties, go to levels, and turn microphone boost from +30 to 0. Then go to enhancements, and turn on noise suppression.
The white noise from my microphone seems significantly better now.