Your microphone has manners. They are merely untrained.
MicManners is a finishing school for the way you sound on calls and recordings. Nearly every "bad mic" is really a bad setting: the wrong input selected, gain doing volume's job, an equalizer that was never introduced to your voice, or noise the software was never asked to remove. We correct all of that with software alone — and when a problem is genuinely physics or a broken part, we say so plainly and stop. You will never find a shopping list here.
Choose your discourtesy
Begin with the symptom, not the software. Choose the complaint people make about you — or the one you make about yourself — and we shall proceed directly to the fix.
"You sound muffled."Like a duvet over the conversation. Usually the wrong input or a Bluetooth call profile — six software fixes.
"You sound robotic."Choppy, garbled, underwater. CPU spikes, packet loss or sample-rate quarrels — fix them in order.
"You sound far away."Present in body, absent in audio. The wrong microphone is usually listening; auto-gain is usually meddling.
"You're too quiet."Everyone leans in and still misses the joke. Levels and gain staging, minus the hiss.
"There's static and crackle."Snap, crackle, apology. Sample rates, buffers, drivers and a busy USB bus — software suspects first.
Not sure? Take the checker.Two minutes of questions to name your symptom, then straight to its page.
The five house rules of sounding decent
Everything on this site descends from five rules. Learn them and you will diagnose most mic trouble before we do.
Address the correct microphone
Half of all "terrible mic" complaints are the right mic sitting idle while a laptop array or webcam listens from across the desk. Check your input device before you touch a single slider — in your system sound settings and in the app, because apps keep private opinions.
Gain before volume, always
Gain decides what your microphone captures; volume decides what others endure. Confusing them is the origin of most quiet, distorted and hissy voices. The distinction has its own lesson.
EQ subtracts before it adds
A voice equalizer is a scalpel for mud and boom, not a megaphone. Cut the offending bands first; boost only with restraint. The full recipe lives in EQ for voice.
Suppress noise last, not first
Noise suppression is finishing school, not first aid. Applied to a badly-set mic it manufactures new artifacts. Levels, then EQ, then suppression — the order is the etiquette. See gate versus suppression for which tool suits which rudeness.
Test before you speak
One thirty-second recording of your own voice, played back honestly, beats an hour of guessing. Our full software chain begins and ends with this test.
What MicManners will not do
We do not recommend microphones, headsets, interfaces, arms, filters or foam. Not because such things never matter — sometimes they do, and we will tell you when your problem is one of them — but because the internet already has ten thousand shopping lists and approximately four pages that first make the mic you own behave. We are the latter. If a fix requires spending money on equipment, our advice ends with that honest sentence, never with a product link.
When the noise itself is the rudeness
Once your levels and EQ are set, what remains is the room: fans, keyboards, traffic, other people's lives. Krisp removes that layer in software, on the way from your mic to any app. Try it politely — 7-day full trial, no card, then from $8/month billed annually if it earns a place at your table. Facts checked 20 September 2026.
Send your noise its regrets — try Krisp Disclosure, as manners require: this button is an affiliate link, and a subscription through it may pay the desk a fee without adding a penny to your bill. The free tools we recommend elsewhere pay us nothing.Questions the desk is asked most
Can software really make a cheap mic sound good?
Software can make almost any working mic sound noticeably better — often dramatically so — by fixing input choice, levels, EQ and noise. What it cannot do is add detail the microphone never captured. Our experience, stated honestly: settings fix the majority of complaints, because the majority of complaints were never about the hardware.
Do I need to pay for anything?
No. Every fix on this site up to noise suppression uses your operating system's own settings or free, open-source tools (Equalizer APO for EQ, Audacity for test recordings — neither pays us anything). Paid noise suppression like Krisp enters only at the final step, and only if your remaining problem is actual background noise.
Which page should I start with?
If you know your symptom — muffled, robotic, distant, quiet, crackly — go straight to its page above. If you want the whole ceremony in one sitting, How to make your mic sound better walks the entire software chain in order.
Why "manners"?
Because bad audio is a social problem before it is a technical one: it interrupts, it fatigues, it makes people ask you to repeat the joke. Fixing your sound is a courtesy to everyone who has to listen to you. Hence the finishing school.