Guest voice is so low while live straming

[shariftamimi]

Greetings all,

Happy New year to you all

I do educational live streaming via FB using OBS
I am facing a problem with audience who barley hear my guests as their voice is so low
I watched lots of videos with no luck
I host my guests vis FB messenger, the audio between us is great as I hear them loud and clear from my laptop speaker, however, when I go live, my voice is loud and the guest become so low to the audience regardless I am hearing then loud

I am not sure where the problem is or how to fix it

I use the following equipment's:
- HP laptop for streaming
- Oppo mobile with iVcam purchased

- The audio setting as attached

I thought to buy a speaker but was not recommended as my laptop speaker is good according to the manufacturer!

Your kind help is more than appreciated

Once again,
Wish you all a very Happy New Year full of hippieness and prosperity

 

[shariftamimi]

Any help please?

 

[AaronD]

There's a big difference between "live" and "broadcast" mentalities for audio, and they're not directly compatible. If you're producing something live to broadcast, then you have to keep both active at the same time.

For live work, you don't know what's coming, and so you have to leave some headroom to let it happen without clipping/distorting. The general rule of thumb, if you don't have any other reason, is about -18dBFS peak. That's a pretty soft rule, but usually followed anyway because there's rarely another reason, and a lot of level-based processing simply assumes that.

For broadcast, you're usually running on a pretty lackluster medium, whether it's over-the-air radio, or cassette tape, or vinyl, or a slow-connection stream, or whatever. So you want to turn everything up as high as you possibly can, to drown out the deficiencies in that medium. The listeners then turn it back down to suit them, and thus turn down the noise. Because *every* broadcaster does that, then that's what the listeners are calibrated for; so if you don't - if you keep your "live headroom" - then you're the quiet one.

You can't "just turn it up" though, because that violates the "live" rule of not knowing what's coming, and so the peaks are going to clip/distort. You need a compressor to do that translation. It turns the louder parts down, above some threshold, which then allows you to turn the whole thing up and not exceed the limit.

OBS has a compressor filter, but it's hard to use. You're effectively twiddling blind. If you know how to listen, it has enough controls that you can make it work, but you do have to know how to listen, and know from the sound, which of 5 controls to tweak and in which direction.

I could explain what they all do, but it's probably better to you to watch a bunch more videos specifically on how to use a compressor. Any compressor will do - digital, analog, brand X, brand Y, whatever - the essentials are all the same. Get familiar with that, and then come back to OBS's compressor filter.

 

[AaronD]

If you do your audio processing *outside* of OBS, so that OBS only knows about the final finished result, then you have an entire world of processing to choose from! I really like this compressor, but I'm afraid it's only available on Linux. Nevertheless, it's a good example of the HUGE difference in visibility (tweaking aids) and control-ability, between OBS's 5-slider version with no metering at all, and what the rest of the world has to offer. If you can find a good compressor in VST format, OBS will take that, and you can have some of this too, on Windows:

That's two copies of the same thing, with different settings, one after the other. The first one is much more gentle, and does most of the work. The second is a hard-stop "safety net" that is just barely bumped up against so that it normally doesn't do very much.

On the left side is a 5-second graphical history of what it just saw and did. On the right is the classic "compressor curve" graph of what it's set to do. On that curve, the input volume is horizontal and the output volume is vertical. As you can see, it's a simple gain (turn-up) below the threshold, and flattens out above the threshold so that additional input volume does not continue to get louder at the output.

And as you can see on the second one, the curve flat-lines right at 0dB, which is the loudest that a final output can get without distorting. Intermediate digital signals can be higher, and brought back down before the final output, but it's generally bad practice to do that.

When I'm running the rig that these screenshots are from, there's a dot on the curve that shows me where it's operating at the moment. Adjusted well, that dot dances around the gentle curve ("soft knee") of the first one, and just barely under the kink ("hard knee") of the second, with occasional blips above the hard knee.

So it still sounds natural, but it matches the expected broadcast level, and never clips. OBS occasionally tells me it's clipping (the meter turns solid red), but I know mathematically, from the settings shown here, that it can't. It does, however, use up *all* of the available headroom, and that's what OBS is keying on for that warning. it's fine.

 

[shariftamimi]

There's a big difference between "live" and "broadcast" mentalities for audio, and they're not directly compatible. If you're producing something live to broadcast, then you have to keep both active at the same time.

I could explain what they all do, but it's probably better to you to watch a bunch more videos specifically on how to use a compressor. Any compressor will do - digital, analog, brand X, brand Y, whatever - the essentials are all the same. Get familiar with that, and then come back to OBS's compressor filter.

I really lost words how to thank you
I am grateful to you for the time you spent expaling that

I will try your kind advice and hopefully this will work

Thanks a lot