Macbook Air Microphone Volume Very Low

You just ended six months of frustration.

Many thanks.

Thank you very much for the idea! Worked like a charm.

I did this and it helped somewhat, but the audio is still too low to be useful. Speaking very loudly, the level never goes above halfway. Using Garage Band to record audio, it's muffled and very low in volume.

Since I'm not sure I've ever used the internal mic in the 5 years I've had this MBA, it's quite likely it's always been like this.

It seems, from the response in system prefs, to tapping on the keyboard area that the mic works great. You can peg the meter easily. But the pickup port is to the side (wrong facing) and even putting my mouth 2" from the pickup holes results in poor sound quality and weak level (although improved).

I think the mic placement inside the MBA is fundamentally flawed. I doubt the mic is even facing towards the pickup holes. Engineering fail.

Hi all,

The Macbook Air microphone port can get clogged.

If you do a Skype test call, and you can hear music playing from your MBA clearly, and you can hear tapping on the laptop clearly, it's probably clogged. That's because the speaker is on the unclogged side (inside your laptop).

You can clean it with an old toothbrush.

Watch my tutorial here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aWpC8N8W08

@Daniel Son dude this is too awesome to be true. I had given up the internal mic for dead and it didn't much bother me until I heard that Sierra comes with Siri, so I thought I'd have one last try and then resign myself to using headphones. Because ifixit says replaces the mic on a Macbook Air 2010 is neither easy nor cheap. I had blown canned air into the holes and that hadn't worked so I thought it was surely a hardware fault. And of course apple hardware test on my machine doesn't work if you don't have the original usb drive with the OS X, and who the **** can ever find a USB they haven't seen in years? The one thing that perplexed me though was that when I TAPPED the keyboard the bars on the mic in system preferences would move ! I thought it if it was broken, why would it detect those sounds? Anyway, I tried the toothbrush never thinking it would work and OMG. Wish I could buy you a beer bro !!!! It's siri time

Magic happens when the power of the internet meets people like you! I took my 2012 MacBook Air to the Apple store & the guy there couldn't figure it out. He confirmed the mic was fine but thought it was either due to me running Yosemite, not Sierra, or a FaceTime glitch. He tried to erase FT to re-install it but couldn't. I, too, wondered why the mic picked up finger drumming & real close paper rustling but not voice from the front that it used to. It wasn't until I tried siri & found that siri & FaceTime had the same issues I twigged it was the mic. A quick Google, found the thread, nearly gave up until I jumped to the end & found your instructional video! A beer from me too. Thanks, Dan.