Sixty seconds before a meeting
Press start, say the sentence you are going to open the meeting with, and look at the hold figure. If it sits between -20 and -9 dBFS you are set. If it sits at −35, everyone will spend the call asking you to repeat yourself and blaming their speakers. If it pins at the top, your consonants are already distorting and no amount of “can you turn your volume down” from anyone else will fix it, because the damage happened at your end.
| Band | Peak range | What MicTester tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Nothing arriving | below -50 dBFS | Below −50 dBFS there is no usable speech in the signal. Either the wrong input is selected, the device is muted in hardware, or nobody is talking. |
| Too quiet | -50 to -20 dBFS | Audible, but the far end will strain. Raise the input gain until your loudest speech peaks land above −20 dBFS. |
| On target | -20 to -9 dBFS | Speech peaks belong in this window. It is the band between the alignment level and the permitted maximum, so you have headroom for a laugh or a cough. |
| Hot | -9 to -0.5 dBFS | Loud enough that a sudden peak can hit the ceiling. Fine if your speech only touches this band; back the gain off if it lives here. |
| Clipping risk | -0.5 dBFS and above | At the ceiling. Anything louder cannot be represented and comes out as distortion that no amount of processing downstream will remove. |
Where these four boundaries come from. −50, −20, −9 and −0.5 dBFS are the thresholds OBS Studio publishes for its own input-level indicator, in the knowledge-base article “Audio Mixer Technical Details” dated 2022-02-13, read directly on 2026-08-15. MicTester reuses them so a reading here means what a reading there means. The band names and the advice in the last column are this site’s own reading of those levels — they are a scale we declare, not a survey of anyone’s microphones, and we have measured no population to support them. Zoom does not publish a target level for its Input volume bar, so this page uses the same reference marks a streamer would — and applies them to the reading from your machine, not to an average of anyone else’s.
Every Zoom audio control, and what it does to the signal
The path is Zoom desktop app → your profile picture in the top-right corner → Settings → the Audio tab. Every control below is named as Zoom’s own documentation names it.
| Control | Where | What it does | Browser equivalent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Microphone drop-down | Settings → Audio → Microphone | Chooses the capture device. | deviceId |
| Test microphone | Settings → Audio → Microphone | Records a short clip and plays it back while the Input volume bar moves — the same loop this page runs, inside the app. | none |
| Input volume | Settings → Audio → Microphone | Manual level. Zoom’s documentation states this slider becomes unavailable while automatic adjustment is on. | none |
| Automatically adjust microphone volume | Settings → Audio → Microphone | Zoom’s own advice: if your audio fades in and out, consider turning this off. That symptom is what gain control sounds like when it is fighting the room. | autoGainControl |
| Microphone modes → Noise removal (default) | Settings → Audio → Microphone modes | Zoom states that by default the app applies noise suppression and echo cancellation, and that the level of background-noise suppression is adjustable. | noiseSuppression |
| Microphone modes → Original sound for musicians | Settings → Audio → Microphone modes | Captures a fuller range of sound for music, and Zoom notes that noise suppression is turned off in this mode. | noiseSuppression: false |
| Test speaker and microphone | The join dialog, before you enter a meeting | Runs the ringtone-then-playback pair without joining audio first. | none |
The gain-control trap
Automatic gain control is the reason so many Zoom microphone problems are hard to pin down, and it is worth understanding before you change anything. With it on, a badly set microphone still sounds roughly correct: the app quietly multiplies a weak signal up until it looks like everyone else’s. What you get in exchange is a level that moves on its own — loud when the room is quiet, ducking when it is not — and a noise floor that comes up with the voice.
Zoom names the symptom itself. Its settings documentation says that if your audio fades in and out, consider disabling Automatically adjust microphone volume. That is gain control hunting. This page leaves the equivalent browser switch on by default so the behaviour matches your meeting; switch it off and watch the meter drop to your real level. Whatever you see then is the level you should be fixing at the device, and the quiet-microphone page works out the gain you are missing in dB.
Microphone modes, in plain terms
Zoom’s Microphone modes section replaces what used to be a scatter of tick boxes. Three choices matter for a mic test.
- Noise removal is the default, and Zoom describes it as its own software processing with adjustable background-noise suppression. This is the mode almost everyone is in.
- Personalized audio isolation uses a voiceprint and is documented as being for crowded environments. It is stronger processing, not lighter.
- Original sound for musicians captures a fuller range and, in Zoom’s own words, turns noise suppression off. If you are demonstrating an instrument, singing, or diagnosing what your microphone genuinely sounds like, this is the mode — and it is the closest match to this page with the noise-suppression switch off.
Zoom also documents an Audio profile option, Live performance audio, which it says aims to reduce audio latency between participants to roughly 30–50 ms and which disables the microphone-mode settings when enabled. That is Zoom’s figure for its own mode, not a measurement of ours; if you want to see where delay comes from in the first place, the microphone latency page shows the buffer arithmetic.
Symptom to setting
- “You’re very quiet.” Peak below −30 dBFS here. Fix the gain at the device, then in Windows, then let Zoom’s slider do the last few dB.
- “You keep dropping out.” Level near the floor with gain control on: the app is gating what it cannot distinguish from noise. Get the raw level up.
- “You sound tinny / far away.” Wrong device. A laptop lid array while you wear a headset sounds exactly like this. Check the device list here.
- “There’s an echo of us.” You are on speakers. Echo cancellation is on by default in Zoom, but it can only do so much; headphones end the problem.
- “You cut out at the start of every sentence.” Noise suppression deciding your first syllable is not speech. Test it with the switch above.
What this page cannot tell you about Zoom
It cannot see inside a meeting. Zoom applies its own processing and its own codec after the point this page ends, so a clip that sounds perfect here can still arrive compressed on a poor connection. It also cannot check your speaker, which is the other half of “nobody can hear me” — Zoom’s Test speaker button plays a tone for exactly that. What this page does prove is that the microphone, the cable, the operating system and the browser are all delivering your voice, which is the half of the problem people waste the most time on.