Can't Disable Noise Suppression on MacOS

[aliahy]

Nothing I've found so far about this question works for me. I can't find a setting on the MacOS client which lets you adjust noise suppression. Selecting "Original Sound for Musicians" or "Live Performance Audio" does nothing. There is no setting to adjust noise suppression to "Low" which was suggested in some posts. Some said the problem is with Windows 11. I'm not using that!

The documentation says AI is used to suppress noise. I want this off permanently! Even for voice meetings. Why is this so much to ask for?

[storyhub]

As an audio engineer I know that computer audio can be very complicated. In this case it most likely is your OS doing the suppression. There is a setting in the control center, depending on which version of the OS you have. You want to use Wide Spectrum.

Voice Isolation, is on most iPhones, iPads and Macs from the last few years as long as you’re running iOS 15 or macOS Monterey. (Anything that supports Spatial Audio seems to also support Voice Isolation.) You can only access the setting when you’re already in a call: you swipe down from the upper-right corner (or click in the upper-right corner on a Mac) to get to the Control Center, then tap on the button that says “Mic Mode.” By default, it’s set to Standard, but there are two other options: Voice Isolation and Wide Spectrum.

[whegardt]

I share your pain. I have exactly the same problem. I can tell that MacOS hears the noise just fine because it shows on the input level in MacOS Sound settings. When I check the input level settings on Zoom, the "noise" does not show up. It is clearly being suppressed regardless of how I set the various audio options in Zoom. I've tried them all. I do have a workaround though, using the browser version of Zoom, the background noise is not supressed and it all works fine. I have only one microphone - the build in microphone. So this is clearly not a hardware problem. I've reported this before, but it falls on deaf ears. This problem is easy to duplicate and has been happening across multiple releases of the Zoom app in 2024 including the current release.