This guy doesn't make tutorials.. this guy educates. Thats why he is the best! He made me understand Davinci Resolve, and now he made me understand sound settings. And i've watched tutorials 3days straight from a huge number of other youtubers and none managed to explain something except the basics which everyone knows..

This sir actually teaches us about sound setting. He explains everything so we can do much better. I am in the stage of testing and retesting, and I have watched this video more than three times for his explanations. This sir doesn’t just make tutorials; this sir educates. That’s why he is the best, This video should be included with you show "revelator iO 24 software". You explain everything so well and really go in-depth with it. The high-pass filter EQ for the game audio is an idea I had never thought of before. After watching your tutorial a few times to really understand it, I began to fix my audio, and I’m really surprised by how much better it sounds! Like WOW! Thank you sir, for your efforts., EposVox!..🙂

Hands down the best tutorial for streamers…. Audio is most important and this video explains every part of audio and how to control it and it not control you. I use 7 audio sources not all at once of course and this has guided me in the right direction to mastering my stream audio… thanks Epos

Dude! Thank you so much for this video. I had major audio issues when I first started streaming. Your content is always so helpful ✨

This video should be included with every OBS install. You explain everything so well and really goes to the bottom with it. The high-pass filter EQ for the Game audio is an idea Ive never thought of before. And after having watched your tutorial a few times to really understand it, I began to fix my audio and Im really suprised just How Much better it sounds! Like WOW! Thank you EposVox!Im gonna send this to my streaming buddies, really hope they follow it to!

Really, really good video. I love the insight into your new processing chain and when the gains come in, as well as the step by step on auto-ducking. Will definitely be coming back to this one!

Audio has always been the hardest thing in setting up my stream. Thank you for going into audio and explaining it where its easily understandable!

THANK YOU. i remember wanting to find a video like this months ago, however many videos didnt exactly apply to a stream/gaming environment. you really hit the nail with the info i was looking for back then.

It is kind of stunning how thorough and thoughtful you are in all of your videos.

I switched from Streamlabs to OBS Studio last March 1 because of your videos regarding Streamlabs controversy and I'm glad that I made the switch. I'll be watching this video later. Thanks so much for the free tutorials! :)

Watching this one year later after I noticed my Livestream YT VOD was quiet and I can't adjust it in post and you made me realize my audio settings were just OK and now they are PERFECT. Great presentation of this too. THANK YOU!

I'm so happy to see EposVox helping the streaming world start to take audio more seriously!! So the pro audio world uses this as the proper level input as a rule. -18 on a dbfs meter is the same as 0 on an analog VU meter which means anything over -18 average is a bit too hot. Sure small peak jumps over -18 are ok but as a rule setting your input gain to -18 and then pushing the output up if it's needed is the right way to go. This is why the Green or "Good" level in something like OBS is set to around -18. Now there are other factors but honestly it can be more confusing than helpful such as LUFs or Peak versus RMS metering. So stick to a -18 dbfs input and your audio will be clean with plenty of headroom.

This is amazing! Best tutorial and knowledgeable person I found. Been looking for an in-depth tutorial and informative tutorial like this.

I've been constantly tweaking my settings, but I wasn't going about the process the best way. This video definitely showed me a better way, and I really appreciate you taking the time to make this.

Man! You explain things that nobody I heard explains. You really did an amazing job bro!!!! I wish I saw this a while back before buying equipment. Thanks for the info!

Amazing video buddy, really in-depth but easily explained and understood. Legend as always.

Dude this is a splendid video! As someone who has seen many videos on this topic, I can say that this was by far the most helpful, accurate and instructional of them all. Congrats and thanks!!

You did such a great job explaining each piece. You are truly the Professor.

This is easily one of the best videos around when setting up both mic and gaming audio. I had issues with my game audio either being too loud with my voice or my voice booming over the game audio and finding out Ducking is awesome. Thanks, awesome video

This video was super helpful!

Such great info in here! Definitely gonna try setting up the sidechaining.

Amazing video! Definitely gonna jump back into our audio settings using this as a guide!

I love audio ducking, it's a game changer I use it in all my videos and streams. This is a great video

Awesome video! Thanks for the help EposVox!

fantastic tutorial - to the point, simple, well explained thank you

Great vid as always! thanks Epos

This video should be the first one you should watch on the entire channel. Great content sir.

This is an excellent video. So many of the "stream gurus" of yesteryear silently moved over to shilling sponsored gear which makes it impossible to find objective opinions. You're teaching critical stuff like gainstaging which streamers never find online because they think channels like podcastage are for audiophiles only. Subscribed and look forward to more :)

Great video all around !

This is the best video on KZfaq covering the topic of stream audio in OBS.

This saved not only my stream volume but also my video audio!! Thanks so much!

This is (I think) going to help me a lot. I sing to backing tracks through an analogue usb mixer into OBS and I tried to add filters to my mic, but when I played the backing track, it was all choppy and impossible to sing along to. Obviously because the filters had affected the whole signal from the mixer. Thanks for this, I'm off to give it a shot lol 😉👍

Has a very new streamer, who has a very basic understanding of audio, but really do want the best for my viewers in the live setting, and for produced content, this is amazing. Thank you so much!

I love all your videos. For videocalls (zoom, g2m) to avoid the low voice volume I'm using all the knowledge I've learnt here as I'm sending OBS audio via a Virtual Cable with Audio Monitor plug in. I don't know if that is the best way but It's working atm.

Got recommended this video on discord, really helped me out, thank you!

awesome video! thank you for so many helpful information. :)

Great vid, thanks! My OBS blew up & I needed to redo all my settings but its been a while since I set everything up so I needed a refresher.

Entertaining and informative. Thanks!

Great video was having issues with my streams lately and this will help a bunch o7

Awesome tutorial, thanks!

I know this video was posted a whole back but can I say THANK YOU! I finally was able to make my audio less shitty thanks to you ❤❤❤❤

Biggest thing for me soundwise was adding a compressor on my system and chat sounddevices for my GoXLR with EAPO. I can't live without it anymore. Everytime I see people struggling with loud games etc. I tell them this. Lifesaver.

This is great!

Ok, so I have just been getting started streaming and I was soooo frustrated following others re-hashed guides with a lot of misinformation! I'm a musician, so I knew the OBS guides I was watching (*cough* Alpha Gaming *cough*), didn't seem right. Having an analog mixer before an audio interface is what I am used to. Every guide I have seen has encouraged me to crank the gain and only reduce it if you are having issues with the noise floor or noise gate threshold. I set mine to 75% just like you said and then added digital gain and I have never sounded better. I haven't even touched EQ! Coming from the world of guitars, where having a generous amount of gain really helps carve out unique tone, to streaming has been a trip! I can't believe how much information you offer. You don't just teach the steps, you teach the concepts, and I cannot begin to thank you enough! No shade meant for Alpha gaming, but they lack the substance you have. I should have started here.

120% agree with the first gain/compressor settings. Great job man, love seeing more of this info out there. you also hit the EQ levels the same as I say: Mic -5 to -10, Discord: -15, Game -20 to -25 (loudest sound), music (-25 to -35). Generally disagree with compressing the game audio for stream, it makes the sound seem different to users that might play.

I do not know if anyone else had this. But the closed captioning went haywire at the halfway point. The first section was great, I am pretty sure you actually took the time to edit the CC. It looks like the time codes just ran off. It was after an add, and I am watching on an Android phone. Great video. Keep up the great work

The OBS color markers always annoyed me because it causes a lot of people to think their mics are peaking when they go into the red. I wish that "true peak" was set by default, because it sets the red zone around -3 dB and is much more accurate. By the way, I love the way you showed to set initial gain. I already did most of this (like setting the compressor and then a limiter after it) as well as compressing other audio based on when I speak. But it's cool to see the whole thing. I do hope that this video gets popular because SO many people on Twitch have inconsistent audio and it hurts to watch. Edit: My only critique, personally, is where you set your levels for background and game music, especially using the original OBS marks. Back in September of 2021, someone published "Recommendations for Loudness of Internet Audio Streaming and On-Demand Distribution". There's a few things in there, but the main thing is that it recommends most audio to be normalized to about -18 LUFS. This document inspired me (despite lacking normalization on OBS) to try to at least get the audio closer, so I generally don't allow my minimum audio to really be lower than -25 or -30 dB. So in my case, I often play music around -20 to -30 dB depending on the song or what we're doing in stream, game audio often sits in the lower part of yellow (which would be about -12 to -20 but is often just normal volume and can reach -5 or so), and then my voice usually sits around -5 to -12 dB. On top of that, I run ducked compressors on my music and game audio, only slightly though. This allows my voice to be easily heard, but for people to still get most or all of the original sound as well. What this also does is, mainly, it helps people that watch on TV or Phone. Often times, with most streams, the audio is so uncompressed that the music level compared to headphones is so low, that when someone talks or gets excited, my speakers are getting blown out. As far as how this translates to headphones, I actually think it helps a lot, especially for people that use it as background noise. The audio is much more "normalized" kind of (mainly consistent), so they can set a volume and not worry about peaks or it getting too quiet. Though that's obviously my own opinion, and the goal is that they are still separated, but much closer together. Edit 2: Ah, I guess you basically do that at the end. My bad, lol. Though, I do think it would've been nice to just suggest that everyone basically does ducking, and offer non-ducking as an alternate solution where you probably mention "true peak" and the levels there. Edit 3: One tip for anyone using a GoXLR, I prefer pulling in the music directly from the input, and not from any outputs. This bypasses the GoXLR and allows you to set your music volume independently. This gives you the benefit of ALWAYS having your music at the same level no matter what (I also have a streamdeck button to set it to 80% in Spotify), and you can then compress it slightly for normalization. It's very handy.

Awesome! Useful

Thank you for this, got my sub. Gonna go do this now

Thanks!

I'm going to be working on this on weekend. I always want my Audio to be perfect.

Saved under favorites for later review, next morning in going to use this in obs ^^.

Audio ducking is very cool. Thanks Epos!

thank you very much 🙏

Very helpful!

great storytelling on this one epos gg brother gg

God damn I love this channel... subbed!

Awesome video.

This video can also help you guys with music production😉 This translates very well he's essentially teaching how to mix and its a very good tutorial

Superb work. Thank you. I’m having an issue with monitoring the mic audio, getting a slight delay in my headphones. I’d love to see your analysis of how to fix those issues.

thanks very nice video again :)

Hi all! I’ll skip right to it, wow does this work! Amazing settings. The only problem, and it’s not with this guide but with games, is that games have different base volumes. My mic maxes around 15-20mb which sounds good. But shooters are particularly loud. The dampening while speaking is a godsend. Without speaking, your game volume should max at 28-30mb. This was around -30 on the slider for bf4. Jedi survivor would require around -22 to reach the 30mb cap. Shooters are just particular loud. Hope that helps!

Again...THANK YOU! Last night I literally had people tell me my audio was clipping. So embarrassing! Now I just ran a test...it's sounds...well...professional! Now I just need to get my gaming on a proffessional level to match! lmao. But THANK YOU!

Alright, time for me to go back and lose my mind tweaking audio settings again! (I kinda love it though, and this will certainly be helpful) Thank you!😂👍❤

9:45 The different filters, gains and so on in all the voice chat software annoyed me. I stumbled upon "Virtual Audio Cable" (VAC) (free version for non-commerical use). In OBS you select the VAC as monitoring device. You can then send your audio to output AND monitoring. Your video conference software can then use the VAC as input device. Thus all your finely tuned OBS settings can be used within every voice chat with the same gain, noise suppression and so on.

This video is so fucking complete, my god.

I was wondering why my mic audio in OBS was showing just shy of red, but in the final mix I felt like it was kinda quiet. Looks like I got some re-working to do with gain and compression filters!

This is the best audio guide i've seen, great job. Now my $30 Fifine sound awesome in OBS but would this work with something like EqualizerAPO so my comms on discord, zoom and in game chat benefits from it? (just the mic filters)

Followed this to the letter and my god you are a saint. I always wonder about my audio in streams and after testing all of this, I definitely have good headroom and better audio quality. Just to add, the ducking effect IS lowering the Broadcast Stream Mix in OBS, but my mic drops off to nothing or doesn't get recorded when I have that sidechain compressor enabled. Maybe I'm trying to duck something that shouldn't be ducked?

This editing woooo 😎

I've been using an OBS plugin by bozbez called "Win-Audio-Capture" and it's allowed me to set each individual exe file with a seperate audio capture without using Voicemeeter. That way I can tune everything individually through OBS. So before my friends in Discord sounded quiet to me but for Stream they were really loud. Now I just added an audio capture source targeting discord exe and I've turned them down on OBS.

Great tutorial, Thanks. I can see that you put the order Boost Back -> Compressor -> Limiter. If I have to add EQ, where should it be put in the sequence?

I love this! Having studied audio engineering it always confuses me how people have their gain so high when they can fix it all in post and have plenty of control I have always ran my sound through a DAW especially with the GoXLR as the ASIO works really well

Equalizer APO seems to also be a great free open source software alternative to using Voicemeeter/Steelseries Sonar, thought I'd mention it just in case

I use EqualizerAPO to apply all of my mic filters incl. compressor, limiter, and sometimes RNNoise(using vst thing) because laptop fan, to the microphone device directly, and all apps get the processed audio, without using virtual audio cable or another sound device or whatever. It's kinda spotty with realtek drivers though, I had to use generic microsoft drivers to make it work, but it works well when it does.

I made a cheep 30 buck mick sound good so far. the side docking is the one part that I have tried to get right and no luck so far.

Needed 60dB of gain on Presonus IO24 for Dynacaster to hit average peaks between negative -18 and -12dB. So much for turning my gain down (it's maxed out). Great video though. P.S - The quality of your videos has really gone through the roof as of late!

thank you.

I still don't get why OBS still hasn't implemented a master bus. For this tutorial to be complete, you would need a master chain. We solve this issue by routing all our audio trough an external soft mixer like voicemeter or even reaper (with that we can record our audio sources seperately) but a master bus would be great. We did use OBS Music Edition for a while but the problem with that is that you can not use all the plugins since it's libOBS is patches and a lot of them don't work. Anyway, an effects chain on the master bus, would make this complete. Every good master needs a compressor+limiter at least.

“Home Improvement” style sound response at the beginning? Take my like and share!

GOD VIDEO !

Thank you, internet guy!

I used to use the OBS compressor until I got a DBX 286s. . . entirely different animal. Good video EV...

I didn't even know that you can add audio filters in obs before watching this video (yes, I'm dumb). Thank you sir.

awesome video, ty for helping new streamers.. so many streamers audio is awful. :)

What should level should the windows microphone be at? I feel like this is common knowledge but no one ever addresses it and I want to know for my own sanity. Great video as always.

8:40 For those confused. He meant to say 50 to 60 ms :)

With using Elgato Wave 3 with Wave Link, does adding the digital gain after setting correct gain still apply when using Wave Link? I don't really see a Gain VST and adding it to OBS will just add it to the all-in-one stream audio from Wave Link. Just trying to make sure what settings apply to something software based like Wave Link.

Yay!

How should I set up a 3dio FS mic into Scarlett 2i2 going into OBS ? I set the gain to 2 oh clock on the scarlett and the sound was so low on twitch. Please help

9:48 There is away to run OBS into other apps with a Virtuial Audio Cable, Voicemeter lets u download one for free and i set it up so i can run OBS into discord and VRChat so my mic doesn't sound dull or too quiet.

Do you have any recommendation for gaming headset with microphone? I have gaming headset Corsair HS80 ... my sound always on streams was fine but I notice that time to time, when I laugh loud or say something very loud it was going in that red line. Now last days it was getting even worse. I'm already using RTX voice for suppress the sounds around (background sounds) and in OBS it was now going in that red line. I literally followed up to your video and done everything the same, however where is BOOST BACK - instead of putting 16db ... I put -6.00db. and its sounds better than if I put 16db. Do you know why for me its sounds better with minus 6db instead of positive 16db? Because I put positive 16db it will be clipping and going into that red line. Do you know why?

I think I had a fundamental misunderstanding of filter/signal chains. So... if your input after hardware gain is above 0, that audio is pretty much ruined and unrecoverable. Okay. But if I'm understanding this right, you can use a gain filter that would bring the audio above 0, and as long as you get it back below zero with compression and/or a limiter... it won't be destroyed? It's not destroyed before it reaches that point in the filter chain? If I'm understanding this right, this will merit completely reworking my filters. I've always put my additional "boost back" gain LAST in my chain, after compression/limiter, because I didn't want to clip early in the chain... but it sounds like I don't need to do that, and should put it first?

I've been having the problem in games like Apex, or which involve gunfire at all, with that sound peaking really badly and being too boomy. Do you have a suggestion for what to set up exactly to keep the game audio evened out? Your Apex clip sounded pretty good

Very, very, very cool video. I've been doing YT vids as a hobby for years and had already learned just about all of these, but that tooks months of mistakes and learning the hard way. One thing i really look forward to about this video, is OMG MAYBE NOW WE'LL HAVE LESS BG MUSIC DROWNING OUT THE PERSON TALKING! gd that's a pet peeve of mine. You even mentioned mic technique at the end...though you put it after the outro...that's bad because i think people are gonna click off of the video thinking it was over and that the end would only have "subscribe to me" crap at the end.

oh man, i'll try and figure this out with a goxlr... but it seems like i'll have to separate the sounds into individual bars

What should my Compressor & Limiter be at for voice chat? Also the EQ & Compressor for Game?

How is the microphone that you recording on transfer over to in game chat?

Seriously, why doesn't OBS have a master bus?!?! I need that in my life Edit: Do you use some kind of dream filter or something on your camera? I love the subtle "glow" effect and haven't seen it used in this type of video, good stuff!

Should i add a noise gate or sound suppression since my mic is capting a lot of ambiant sounds or just lower the gain?