Center clipping is applied with acoustic echo suppression in a two-way voice communication system to reduce a microphone signal to the background noise floor when speech is not present. For integration with a microphone array, the center clipping processing determines whether speech is present based on estimates of the overall leak through and instantaneous microphone power across the microphone array channels. The overall estimates can be calculated as a dot product of the microphone array coefficients computed by a sound source localization process and separate estimates for the respective microphone channel.