How to disable noise suppression when an application is using the microphone.

Hi,

Thanks so much to all who have shared on this post.

It greatly helped me and my community (the piano sound had been suppressed on a Windows 11, HP Envy) .

I created a resource summarising the workarounds listed on this forum for my community - feel free to share if it's helpful.

https://www.canva.com/design/DAFeD9W1WMo/aN9p7spfw0-rijaJhYYamw/view?utm_content=DAFeD9W1WMo&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link2&utm_source=sharebutton

Special thanks to Lenka, Erop, Paul, Robyn, Dorset, AYMAIA and Robbie.

I have just solved this problem on a friends windows 11. You don't need any special software, it is just one box to uncheck .Windows 11 to allow music to play

As I don't have windows 11 myself, I cannot give the correct picture, but this is the area you need to be.

No extra software, only one box to uncheck.

We could not work out why changing from a windows 10 to windows 11 laptop, the music from the chapel services could not be heard. Now it can. (Of course with Zoom you still need the original sound setting.)

Hope this helps.

I was working with a client with the same issue on Windows 11. Thanks to these suggestions, we were able to find a Dell application called "Dell Optimizer" that was suppressing background noise on all audio inputs.

So it seems there are different applications doing this. Does Windows 11 have new features that open up this functionality to these applications, thus the reason we are seeing this?

Just to add to this horrible experience - I had the same problem on a new Dell latitude 5530 laptop, Windows 11, with Realtek audio. I had all the "Enhance audio" settings turned off, as above, and no additional audio software - I didn't have Dell Optimizer, or the Dolby one, or the Realtek console - nothing at all. And recording in audacity would record my voice, but not my guitar. The quick test is just to record your voice, and then clap a couple of times. Audacity would capture the voice, but not the claps.

I eventually solved it by *installing* Dell Optimizer for the first time, and then disabling all of the audio enhancements in Dell Optimizer. There is also a master enable/disable button at the top which I disabled for good measure. And then audacity recorded claps and my guitar as well.

Somehow, the echo cancellation (or whatever it is) was activated in an invisible way that wasn't possible to turn off without using something like Dell Optimizer. Is that a Windows 11 bug (ie, disabling the enhancements should disable whatever audio "correction" was happening, but it doesn't) that Dell Optimizer by chance fixes? Very unclear, but that has prevented me using this laptop for audio for its first year of life.

I wrestled long and hard with this on a new Acer laptop. Tried all sorts of suggestions at driver level or in Zoom. In the end it was an app probably under Acer control: Realtek Audio Console. All speakers must have 'speakers noise cancellation' switched off, and all microphones have 'AI noise reduction' switched off.

It will be a different app name in other laptop makes, for example I saw a post where a Dell Inspiron needed MaxxAudio Pro to be tweaked in the same way.

They should not have set the music cancellation default to 'on' and then made it so hard to find, with neither Windows nor apps like Zoom giving any clue where to find it.

Finally! I did just this - disabled the Noise Reduction in the MaxxAudio Pro - and now songs come through Zoom without suppression. I had tried just about all of the suggestions I could find anywhere and nothing would stop the automatic suppression until now. Thank you! It was a maddening journey.