User's audio feed affected by noise cancellation despite turning it off.

[Man0nTheHill]

I teach guitar over Zoom and we use headphones and quality microphones so we can turn off noise cancellation and echo cancellation to actually be able to hear each other play our instruments.

Normally this is not a problem but despite turning off  "automatically adjust mic volume," setting "suppress background noise" to low, enabling "original sound", enabling high "fidelity music mode" and having echo cancellation set to auto, his feed completely shuts down all guitar playing in an impressive way. When he talks during guitar playing, his voice is also affected.

Anyone have any idea what this might be? He is using a Samson GoMic with a Dell Latitude 7430 with Windows 10 Pro

Any help is much appreciated.

[ZoomTestKitchen]

That's got to be super frustrating. I'm just going to drop some thoughts here with a couple more things to try. There isn't anything you've shared that is glaringly wrong.

1. Confirm that the Polar Pattern for the mic is set to Cardioid. I believe when the mic is in its upright position the switch would want to be in the top position. That will stop it from picking-up sound that could be reflecting on the back-side from a wall or computer screen, etc.
2. Speaking to that possible reflection, if it is happing Zoom may very well be removing it due to Echo Cancellation being ON. I would suggest turning it OFF (unchecked).
3. With a cardioid microphone position of the mic to musician is important. Rather than write my thought, I'm just including the link to the microphone manual on page 8. They do a good job explaining it along with including some use-cases, such as vocals, instruments, etc.
   http://www.samsontech.com/site_media/support/manuals/GoMic_OM_EN_V2.3.pdf
4. Finally,  your student will want to make sure that the microphone is not Clipping. This mic flashes red LEDs when the input signal is too strong.

I hope this helps.

[Man0nTheHill]

Thanks for the input, I really appreciate it.

It's totally weird. He has restarted, uninstalled and reinstalled Zoom, all the normal fixes. Very frustrating, especially since after over 4000 Zoom lessons (most of them with students using this mic), this is the first time this has come up.

I feel it has to be some sort of driver problem or some program somewhere in the loop inserting it's own brand of noise reduction into the mix. It's a very quick and efficient stoppage of the guitar sound. I know it's not the native programming of the mic. It's designed to be a great mic without any internal processing. Any chance it may be a Windows thing?

Also, I wish I could uncheck echo cancellation. The only choices I've ever seen are Auto and Aggressive.

[ZoomTestKitchen]

I have highlighted the Echo Cancellation option that I would try turning-off.