Skype still internally messes with mic volume even...

Question

I'm running Skype 6.21, but that's pretty irrelevant because this has happened for a long time and I've asked about it in the past with no response. I'll try and explain this as simply as possible.
Skype has some sort of audio control that focuses on quieter sounds and sometimes makes them louder. This can be background voices, a car going by, music in the background, a loud fridge, or anything similar to that. It then adjusts the volume without actually changing windows microphone volume. It's an internal automatic gain that takes place even when the checkbox is disabled. My microphone volume in control panel stays the same, but what people here is a much louder audio stream, until I speak and it ramps back down again. This is bad because people with loud computer fans or a lot of background audio end up overpowering other people in a conference, and until someone points it out, they have no way of knowing because there is no visible volume change. I understand that for the most part this is good, and it's one of the many dumbing down tactics used by Skype to make people's audio sound better, but sometimes it is a huge problem and I want a way for more technically inclined people to disable it. It's very selective about what it will decide to auto-gain, but it's still autogain. Many people I know are using laptops with internal microphones, which by design will pick up surrounding sounds almost as clearly as their own. I've read an article recently telling me to open up shared.xml and add an <AGC>0</AGC> line or something like that, but the article was dated March 2012, and this does not seem to work in the latest version of skype. To be clear, I don't want to just disable this for me, I want to disable this for all of my conference participants. It is not as much of a problem on mobile operating systems (presumably because Microsoft assumes you'll be a lot closer to your phone at all times), so accessing that filesystem and disabling it is not as important to me or others, but a solution for Windows and Mac would be amazing.
I can still call the test line, play something at low volume and hear it back as something that slowly increases until it is very loud. I have a pretty professional studio setup in my living room with a condenser microphone and ways to route music and other audio through. I also use TeamTalk, TeamSpeak, and other similar programs with no problems after I turn off automatic gain control.

Answer 1

As you explained there's valid reason why we have put the the automatic microphone gain control (AGC) put in place. Two solutions I can offer for your setup:
Ask participants in your conference to mute and unmute their microphones. We even have a built in "Push to talk" functionality that allows for that. See here: https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA12025/what-are-hotkeys-and-how-do-i-use-them
Replace the laptops' builtin microphones with proper table microphones. These perform much better in picking up the right (human) audio source and prevent AGC from picking up background noise.
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