Short YouTube Q&A in which two speakers explain that Chrome adjusts microphone input volume via auto gain control (AGC). AGC increases or decreases capture gain so voices are heard at consistent levels—useful for room microphones at variable distances in video conferencing, less necessary for headsets where microphone distance is constant. The clip attributes the behavior to Chrome/WebRTC implementations.
Why does Chrome modify the microphone's input volume?
So we often see people complaining that when you use Chrome and WebRC, you see the microphone level at the operating system display for the microphone volume change. And the reason for that is sometimes you are very. And then Chrome will crank up the volume to make sure that your voice is captured at an adequate level. That's called auto gain control, and it's generally considered helpful unless you know that you're in a very specific environment where you have headsets which take care of echo cancellation and so on.
Yep. I think it is built for this kind of microphone. For example, when I can just move around and you won't notice the difference. And I guess the origin is because video conferencing started in meeting rooms, and there people sit in different instances from the microphone. So there is a microphone in the middle of the room or a few of them, and each one has a different distance from the microphone, and we don't want them to have different volumes to them when we hear them on the other side. So what they did in video conferencing was just level up and align all of them, all of the people, to the same volume level.
Yes. Whereas when you use a headset, the distance to the microphone is always the same.
Exactly. Okay.
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