One of the most common questions we get is, "How much does uni-directional (AKA: Noise-canceling) mode decrease background noise?"
Well my friends, I had our resident handy-man and podcast host James Pella set up a little test to get you some answers.
For those that only care about the end results and not the "How did we test it" here's the audio clips:
This is the version where we decreased the mic gain to nearly eliminate all background noise at 60dB.
The Setup
We set up a laptop in the Antlion Laboratory (James' garage) with some nice speakers, a decibel meter, and this audio clip:
I know, this is the best video ever. Watch all 2 hours!
We did some quick research and it turns out the average noisy office is 60db, at least according to Canada's Safety Council (https://canadasafetycouncil.org/workplace-safety/office-noise-and-acoustics). Hey, Canadians can't lie, but we cross checked it anyway and pretty much everyone states an office is between 45-60db.
With that we cranked the speakers up and stood 6ft away to get a nice ambient 61db of sound so we can get a nice clear test of the differences.
Keep in mind that this is done at 61dB which is substantially louder than nearly every gaming environment short of a major LAN. I don't know about YOUR office, but if my office was averaging 61dB I'd spend a lot of time with noise canceling headphones on... or with pillows strapped to my head.
The ModMic 5 is plugged into a laptop set to 100 volume and +20dB boost, just to enhance the noise even further. We normally have this laptop set to +10dB.
From here it was a simple task of talking into both modes:
And finally a clip that has both side by side:
Then, we simply turned down our mic boost (+10dB) until we eliminated nearly all of the background noise in Uni-directional mode:
So there you have it! Have more questions? Drop us a comment below and see what else we can do in Antlion's Laboratory (Still located in James' garage).
Special thanks to our new audio host, Mixcloud! It's free!