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Noise floor

The constant hiss under your voice — and how far down it belongs.

By Thomas Linck, founder · Updated June 2026

The noise floor is the constant background level that sits under your voice — room tone, hiss, hum, the air conditioning you stopped hearing. It is read in dBFS, and a common voice-work target is a floor below −60 dBFS with voice peaks around −12 to −6 dBFS. The wider the gap between voice and floor, the cleaner the recording reads.

WHY IT MATTERS

Viewers cannot name your noise floor, but they hear it — a wash of grey behind the voice that quietly files the video under "homemade". The fix is a gap, not a plugin: a closer mic raises the voice while the room stays put, so there is simply less noise to remove. And resist over-denoising — watery, robotic artifacts sound worse than mild room tone.

TARGET · STANDARD
Noise floorbelow −60 dBFScommon voice-work target
Voice peaks−12 to −6 dBFSa wide gap over the floor
Fixcloser mic, modest denoisequieter, not silent
How CutScore measures it CutScore measures the gap between your voice and the noise floor across the whole file, then flags the stretches where the floor sits highest with timestamps — so you know whether the fix is a modest denoise pass or simply a closer mic next time.
Get this measured automatically See a sample report
RELATED TERMS
How to fix background noiseMake your audio sound professionalWhy audio sounds muffled or bad
QUESTIONS

Frequently asked.

Below −60 dBFS for voice work, with your voice peaking around −12 to −6 dBFS. The exact number matters less than the gap: the further the floor sits under the voice, the cleaner the recording reads.
No. Aim for quieter, not silent. Push a denoiser until the room is dead and the voice goes with it — watery, robotic artifacts sound worse than mild room tone. Leave a little room in, and let the voice stay human.