I am talking about equipment noise: microphones, preamps, mixers, etc....not your refrigerator or fan noise etc.

I see people asking: 'where do I get an app to cancel noise' ? Well, you CANNOT cancel noise, you can only cut it's frequencies, which will make your recorded voice sounding.....weirder. The best thing to do is to make sure the noise doesn't get in there in the first place!

Here's one of the secrets.....make SURE your microphone is NOT a dynamic microphone. I just changed mine for a CONDENSER microphone (which requires phantom power) and now my speech is TWICE as loud without changing my speech at all, which means the noise floor is pretty much non existent. With a dynamic microphone the noise floor was MUCH higher because these microphones are WEAK and not very sensitive (they are made for LOUD sounds, like loud vocalists, drumkits, or loud guitars. They are intentionally weaker because loud sounds would otherwise make them distort. ) But they are a terrible choice for SPEECH. Instead, condenser microphones are WAY more sensitive, which means they 'amplify' your voice a lot more powerfully, so the signal-to-noise ratio improves TREMENDOUSLY.

One of these little 'secrets' that make a HUGE difference. I am sure someone has created courses with a dynamic mic and wondered why there's all the hiss underneath. Took me two days to learn all this, so this should save someone else's time now. I changed my dynamic Behringer XM8500 (an excellent, and cheap, pro DYNAMIC microphone) for a Behringer C-2 (an excellent, and cheap, pro CONDENSER microphone). With the latter, I solved the annoying hiss problem. The dynamic mic is not 'worse', it is simply the WRONG mic for speech, that's what I am saying here.