According to Alsamixer I do have a HDA Intel soundcard with Nvidia MCP77/78 HDMI chip (Realtek sound card on MSI notebook). When I use Skype under Ubuntu 12.04 for video calls, the other side hears background noise such as in Windows when you have your microphone boosted. In fact they can hear everything, even the fans turning on. There is nothing tweaked on Ubuntu's fresh installation. Also tried this site: https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-audio-dev/+archive/alsa-daily/+packages , but there are no *.deb files that I can test if any fix the problem. The question is if there is a way to add/tweak something to enable on software level the noise cancellation like the Windows sound drivers have that option. I use my build in mic.