Audio recording with Laptop peaks

[punknart]

Hello everyone,

Im currently studying a master and Im recording the classes with my laptops mic (with teachers permission). But Ive been struggling a bit with the recording because sometimes the volume of the recording is quite loud and sometimes its low. The teacher moves around the class and when he goes further from me (not too much, the classroom is not huge), the mic captures a weak signal, like if there is some sort of filter (like a noise suppressor). I tried to record with my phone and sound is not cut like my laptop does. I have no filters installed in OBS so maybe there is something going on in Windows or Lenovos software?Maybe this is a dumb question, but how do I fix that? Ive got a Lenovo Yoga 7i 16" with windows 11 installed.

Thanks in Advance

 

[AaronD]

The phone probably has auto-gain, which is more-or-less a slow-release limiter. OBS has a limiter too, as one of its filters, but you have to add it yourself, and then adjust it to do what you want. Or a compressor may or may not work better for you. Try both and see what happens.

A limiter is simply a compressor with the Ratio turned all the way up, and often has the makeup gain in front instead of after. Otherwise, they're pretty much the same thing. If you know that, you can take a compressor and make a limiter out of it.

Keep in mind though, that if you set the compressor/limiter to a high default gain (so it can turn down from there when the teacher gets close), it'll amplify whatever room- and electronic-noise you may have when everything else is quiet. That's just an inherent gotcha to using that tool, no matter who makes it or how well it's praised.

The phone probably also has a noise suppressor, in addition to the auto-gain. I know my phone does, as a few seconds into video-recording a helicopter hovering close by (very loud, constant sound), the recorded sound started to fade out and eventually became silent. OBS has that as a filter as well: make it the first thing in your audio chain, followed by the compressor and/or limiter.

If you decide that there's too much bass or you need some other tonal adjustment, the equalizer (EQ) filter would probably go before the final limiting step, but the exact position is up to you. It makes a slight difference whether it's before or after an intermediate compressor, but the only difference that it makes to the noise suppressor is while you're adjusting the EQ. If the sound changes going into the noise suppressor, it'll take some time for it to figure out the new noise sound.

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For what it's worth, the audio chain that I've settled on in my studio is a highpass filter around 150-200Hz or so (not exact), followed by a noise suppressor with fairly conservative settings (I reduce the ambient noise first, so it has as little to do as possible), then two compressors. The first compressor is set to be more gentle and less obvious, and the second compressor is a "brickwall" limiter. The compressors' makeup gains are set to end up with exactly full-scale peaks coming out of the second compressor (as a limiter).

That's in a DAW - Digital Audio Workstation - which is practically a complete sound studio in one app. The output of that then feeds OBS as a finished soundtrack to pass through unchanged.

But for what you're doing, you can probably get away with OBS's audio processing. Same idea as mine, but with less visibility (OBS really needs better meters! Especially intermediate ones between filters.) Or if you're only doing audio, you might look at using a DAW too, instead of OBS.