Electronic – Amplified electret mic gives a lot of low frequency noise

electretnoiseoperational-amplifier

I am trying to build a circuit that amplifies an electret microphone. I have made it based of a youtube video.

The microphone sort of works at this point, however there is huge amounts of noise around 0 to 100 Hz.

I have connected the mic to my PC and with some software analysed the frequencies and it gives the following graph:
Frequency analysis when no sound is noticable

The graph is what the microphone puts out when it is in a mute environment.

I have used capacitors to remove any noise from the power supply, and I have tries using a high pass filter but that doesn't seem to really solve anything as I would need to use a very high cutoff frequency.

I should also note that when I increase the gain, the noise also increases, so I assume the noise comes before the signal is amplified.

Circuit

This is the circuit as shown in the video, I have made mine exactly alike, also using the same op-amp.

Best Answer

Low frequency noise (~50/60Hz) is mostly caused due to induction of electrical noise into the traces on PCB (or wires, if you're not using a PCB). This is particularly bad with breadboard setups due to the nature of their construction.

Since you have figured out that the source of noise inductance is between your microphone and the amplifier, you could try a few techniques to reduce it:

  1. Use shorter wires between mic and amp
  2. Use electromagnetically shielded cable (wrap some grounded aluminium foil around it maybe?)
  3. Use a twisted pair cable (keep them differential)
  4. Keep the ground connection of mic close to that of amp, and use equal length wires (adds to the above point)