What noise floor means
Noise floor is the level of everything present in a recording when nobody's talking — your microphone's own self-noise plus whatever the room adds on top: a computer fan, distant traffic, air conditioning. It's measured against the same scale as your voice, so a high noise floor doesn't just sit quietly underneath — it competes for headroom and makes aggressive noise reduction more likely to be needed later.
Why true digital silence sounds wrong
Cut a gap so clean it registers as literally zero, and it reads as broken rather than quiet — the ear expects some ambience and notices its sudden absence. This is the same reason an over-aggressive noise gate sounds worse than the noise it's removing: it pumps the room tone in and out with every pause, which is far more distracting than a steady, low background ever was.
A concrete benchmark
ACX, Audible's audiobook standard, requires a noise floor below -60 dB RMS — a useful number even if you're not narrating audiobooks, since it's a genuinely quiet room by most home-recording standards. If you're comfortably under that, background noise stops being a real problem regardless of what you're recording for.
Lowering it at the source
- Get closer to the mic so you need less gain to reach a normal level.
- Turn off anything with a fan, compressor or spinning motor nearby.
- Add soft furnishings — curtains, a rug, a duvet behind you — to cut reflections too.
- Record in the smallest soft-furnished space available; a closet often beats a large room.
Capture it on purpose
A few seconds of genuine silence — mic live, nobody speaking — at the start of every session gives you a clean profile of the room's true noise floor. It's useful for gap filling if you ever need natural-sounding room tone in an edit, and it gives noise reduction tools an honest fingerprint to work from instead of guessing.
Doing it automatically
Optivox measures the actual noise floor of your recording before touching anything, then applies only as much cleanup as the file needs — never chasing it down to an artificial, unnatural silence.