evandude
New Member
I have been looking at a lot of the low-priced computer microphones, and i have one that was pretty cheap (10 bucks or so).
A lot of the boom mics claim to be "noise cancelling". Just to be clear, I am NOT talking about the $70+ noise-cancelling microphones, which are probably nice and complicated and probably work great. I am talking about the $10-20 ones. However, they don't have any external power (unless power is supplied via the 1/8" jack or something, but they go into standard PC microphone jacks, and as far as I know, those aren't powered...)
Therefore, I figure they could only include PASSIVE filtering, not some form of active filtering (detecting noise and adjusting accordingly, whatever) as the name might suggest. However, i've seen the inside of one, and there is no circuitry besides the microphone element and a mute switch.
Do they ever put any sort of filtering circuitry in the mic element itself? If not, then the only way the microphone is any better than a standard one is if they used a higher-quality microphone element to begin with, which is an understandable difference but hardly counts as "noise cancelling"
The biggest thing that gets me is people I know who have tried them have said they are FAR superior to other cheap, but non-noise-cancelling microphones... just orders of magnitude better... So i'm trying to figure out if it's due just to a better quality mic element, or if there is some passive filtering circuitry. If it is just passive filtering, then potentially I could add some simple external filtering circuitry and get equally good results with a non-noise-cancelling mic. I know I could just buy a $20 noise-cancelling mic and get it over with but part of me would feel ripped off if it were just a passive filter difference, not to mention, if i could improve it with just a simple passive filter, I could probably do even better adding an active filter of some sort, possibly adjusting the response to best match the environment I use it in (which is in a car, so road noise is a huge problem)
Any thoughts?
A lot of the boom mics claim to be "noise cancelling". Just to be clear, I am NOT talking about the $70+ noise-cancelling microphones, which are probably nice and complicated and probably work great. I am talking about the $10-20 ones. However, they don't have any external power (unless power is supplied via the 1/8" jack or something, but they go into standard PC microphone jacks, and as far as I know, those aren't powered...)
Therefore, I figure they could only include PASSIVE filtering, not some form of active filtering (detecting noise and adjusting accordingly, whatever) as the name might suggest. However, i've seen the inside of one, and there is no circuitry besides the microphone element and a mute switch.
Do they ever put any sort of filtering circuitry in the mic element itself? If not, then the only way the microphone is any better than a standard one is if they used a higher-quality microphone element to begin with, which is an understandable difference but hardly counts as "noise cancelling"
The biggest thing that gets me is people I know who have tried them have said they are FAR superior to other cheap, but non-noise-cancelling microphones... just orders of magnitude better... So i'm trying to figure out if it's due just to a better quality mic element, or if there is some passive filtering circuitry. If it is just passive filtering, then potentially I could add some simple external filtering circuitry and get equally good results with a non-noise-cancelling mic. I know I could just buy a $20 noise-cancelling mic and get it over with but part of me would feel ripped off if it were just a passive filter difference, not to mention, if i could improve it with just a simple passive filter, I could probably do even better adding an active filter of some sort, possibly adjusting the response to best match the environment I use it in (which is in a car, so road noise is a huge problem)
Any thoughts?