Electronic Pop Protection for Microphones

Pop noise caused by plosives generated by talkers, singers and other vocalists has long been a topic of interest to microphone manufacturers. The articulation of speech plosives (oral-stop consonants such as p, t, and k) can severely degrade the quality of a recording or performance. This is especially true for pressure-differential microphones, where not only is the unwanted artifact heard, but also there is the high potential for either microphone or associated electronics overload. Traditional wind/pop shields made of foam or a stretched fabric have been in use for many years, and are adequate for most common applications. However, it may be desired or advantageous to use an electronic version of pop protection under conditions where a pop or wind screen is not practical or sufficient, such as when using a lapel or podium microphone that is designed to be visually unobtrusive. The results presented in this paper describe a relatively simple procedure to reduce microphone sensitivity to speech plosives via physically-informed signal processing methods, or Electronic Pop Protection (EPP). The EPP system itself comprises two parts: 1) detection of the presence of pop (turbulent air-jet flow) in the signal, and 2) suppression of this transient noise. A DSP-based demonstrator was created to illustrate and measure the operation of the algorithm on actual hardware. Finally, an objective evaluation of the algorithm is presented.