Does the OBS volume meter correlate with hardware volume meters 1:1?

D

D-Crypt

New Member
I have a Focusrite Scarlett Solo. Out of the box, it has a ring indicator for each audio input that shows the following colours for each respective volume level:
  • Green = -24 to -6 dBFS
  • Yellow = -6 to 0 dBFS
  • Red = 0 dBFS (clipping)
The only issue is that monitoring the ring colours while talking and looking at a screen is tricky to gauge the signal as the rings have very little decay; you won't know roughly how healthy your signal is without eyeballing the ring extensively, and even then it flickers so quickly that it can be hard to accurately estimate. I'd rather just use OBS' volume meter, which gives you plenty of time to see where exactly you peaked and adjust accordingly.

From testing, it seems as though the ring lights up green as soon as OBS registers -24 db, and also seems to light yellow at around -6 (although it gets harder to tell at this point), so it seems to be spot-on in accuracy. It's much more tricky to tell if OBS clips (white dot) just slightly before the clipping occurs on the Solo, though. Sometimes it seems to clip when it's yellow (but bordering on red), but again it's hard to visually see if that's true with how quickly the rings flicker. I just want to make sure that the volume in which my mic clips and OBS clips are the same (with no filters such as compressors in effect).
 
It does not. Hardware meters indicate input at the device level (so you can set your initial input gain correctly and never clip). Then Windows does its boost/cut on the interface software input (Levels in the Sound interface, 50 is 'unity' with no boost or cut). Then OBS goes based on the system input level.

Really what you want to do is set your input gain properly (gain staging); the gain knob on your interface is NOT a volume knob. You raise it up until it just barely flickers red when you clap or make other loud noises, then turn it down just a tiny bit so it never actually hits red. You never touch that again until you attach a different mic. Then in Windows Sound, you set the interface device level to 50. This will give you the lowest noise floor while maintaining the maximum dynamic range of the mic. Then in OBS you add VSTs or Filters to alter the gain, EQ, and other aspects of the signal.
 
Thanks for the detailed response! When I checked my audio interface it was already set to 100 by default, and if I show the decibels as opposed to percentage it shows up as 0.0 dB; googling throws up a couple results saying that 100 is unity gain, too. Am I missing something?
 
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