Stopping the microphone from automatically adjusting level

Anonymous
2020-03-26T14:52:20+00:00

Every time I run a meeting in the Teams app, my microphone level automatically gets set to 100%. 

I have set the communications option in the control panel to do nothing and there appears to be no option in the app to stop it from doing this. I have a sensitive microphone that requires low gain - this is very frustrating as I am using it to teach lessons remotely.

Any ideas?

Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Teams for education | Meetings and calls | Other

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  1. Anonymous
    2021-01-20T11:00:57+00:00

    This Teams mic volume control behavior is simply preposterous!

    I just bought a brand new USB mic to upgrade the rather poor audio quality when using the built-in mic of my laptop during Teams meetings.

    The USB mic is a clear improvement when testing it with some basic recording software like Audacity, but completely useless for use in Teams: mic level is reduced to 1%, basically completely muting the mic...

    As the USB mic is a higher quality podcast type of mic, it is far more sensitive than the typical built-in mic, so I guess Teams somehow feels the need to dial the volume all the way down because the mic (which doesn't have any kind of noise suppression built in) is picking up way more sounds than a built-in mic does.

    Teams settings really should include some sensitivity dials to allow users to finetune to different mics rather than only provide automatic mic leveling clearly "optimized" for poor quality built-in mics, typically already including some sort of noise suppression.

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  2. Anonymous
    2021-01-04T16:16:45+00:00

    I found that deactivating the "Noise supression" option by setting it to "Off" and restarting the teams app no longer forcefully sets my mic volume to 43, i had the problem that my mic sounds fine on 100 and teams always forced it to 43 making me barely audible. 

    I happened upon the same fix just now, myself. This seems to be the feature that manipulates the mic level.

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-12-22T13:44:29+00:00

    I'll add one more to this problem.

    Absolutely a Teams issue.  I run multiple microphones and studio equipment.  Everything works fine, except for Teams.  The advice to turn off the exclusive control is garbage.  With it turned off, I sit and watch the volume level fluctuate in real time between 85 and 40.  It doesn't do this with my webcam microphone, or other microphones that are being preprocessed.  It only does this with standalone microphones and it is a total PITA.

    Like others, I've resorted to running software preprocessing to get around Microsoft ignoring this issue.

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-08-27T20:59:22+00:00

    Thanks, this worked. However, for it to work I had to tick the "listen this device" box in the microphone settings. As a result, I'm constantly hearing my voice in the default playback device, which is quite annoying. Is there a workaround for this?

    EDIT: I muted "Cable Output" in the volume mixer and it seems to work fine.

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  5. Anonymous
    2020-07-28T14:37:20+00:00

    Same problem on Mojave mac, what do i do?

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