THE lack of access to physical stores here (local stores) means that buying used microphones (high end but a lot cheaper) isn't possible and isn't legal, either. In the meantime, in light of this article from this morning/afternoon, I've decided to try noise cancellation that does not rely on hardware-level DSP but instead refines the sound at software level (filtering based on thresholds with criteria centered around human voice). It turned out to be better than I had expected, albeit I still adjust some thresholds, seeing (or hearing) that some words get cut off, making the whole thing slightly less comprehensible (albeit without background noise).

"Given the low quality of the physical microphone that I use, the resultant sound (after such real-time processing) isn't bad at all, so I'll likely persist in using it until/unless I get an external one."The video above concerns my experience setting up and adjusting the software, which could still use a touch of improvement. At the moment it's strongly tied to Red Hat's (IBM's) sound stack and nothing else. Given the low quality of the physical microphone that I use, the resultant sound (after such real-time processing) isn't bad at all, so I'll likely persist in using it until/unless I get an external one. ⬆