noise gating Microphone with noise gating

[Andres Ramos]

Today I tried to implement stages from my SkySound receiver in my microphone circuit. Specifically a self adjusting load for the electret condenser microphone and the SSM 2167 noise gating circuit.

I got interesting results. Basically the noise from the microphone and environment provides the same pk modulation as with the LED in the SkySound Receiver. But you get the "real" microphone voices on top. Here some examples.

Gained with noise gating

 A sequence gained with noise gating. At the end the last Utterance was repeated and processed:

"Wir sind die Toms" :

"Mach mein"s:

 

Here voices gained without noise gating:

"Andrés, werden uns beteiligen" (poor quality):

"Am Fenster sitzen wir":

"Hab ihn unterbrochen". This voice was gained from a radio football broadcast in the background

Apart from the fact that the noise gating adds croaky and hissing voices like I know from other devices, the quality of the voices seems not to be different from normal microphone spirit voices. So I think noise gating is a nice idea and implementing it into the microphone offers some interesting use cases with different backgrund sound levels that could be adjusted to slightly touch the noise trigger threshold but basically one could do without the noise gating as well I think.

I will do more tests tomorrow.