How to Use OBS Audio Filters to Have the Best Streaming Sound Quality
Audio is something that often gets overlooked. But it is supposed to be the first thing that you take care of when starting to stream.
So today’s topic is about audio tips for OBS. When you just start out to configure on OBS, there are fancy settings to get you bewildered. But leave most of them unchanged, your life will be simpler. Under audio setting, keep the sample rate and the channel to default.
What you should fiddle with are just the microphone filters, and you’re not going to use all of them. But you have to place the necessary ones in order. It’s the rule of thumb that noise filters should go first. Otherwise, the compressor will just increase the quiet background sound when the filter is taking effect to make sound level even. There are two kind of noise filters, noise suppression and noise gate. The suppression is for everyone, which is aimed to filter out noise of your microphone and does not have much practical effect generally. Because it only tries to block some of the frequency of your voice, either you will sound distorted or sound no difference. So you can just save some times and focus more on the noise gate. Literally it sets the gate to cut off the mic when you’re not talking or the volume level below certain amount. It is rather effective when you get silent in a very loud environment. Instead of making trials and errors in built with gate from OBS, we recommend a plugin from Reaper, which is more straight forward to get noise profile. Just a few click to create a profile of your voice or room noise and suppress that sound from you microphone from there.
The third filter is compressor, which helps with those situations when you’ve got an exciting moment or screamed in your game. What it actually does is automatically turn down volume. Normalize all the different volumes to make sound more constant and even. It is also more intuitive to use one from Reaper than the internal one of OBS. The settings you applied are completely depend on how loud your voice is, what microphone you’re using, what use environment you’re in. Such setting is unique and personal to you. There’s no set in stone best setting for you. What you’re going to need to do is play around with and get to something that sounds good to you.
The last filter available from OBS is gain boost or reduction. But it’s not always the more filters you add the better. The above three is enough to up your sound quality to another league. And some USB microphones even equip with on-body dial, with such quick adjustment feature, there is less need to configure on a software.