Mic sounds different in OBS only

[feli123]

Hi! I’m having an audio issue that I can’t figure out so any help would be appreciated

I’m using OBS 32.1.2 on a MacBook Pro with an M4 chip, and I’m having a really strange microphone issue. My voice records mostly normally, but OBS won’t pick up clapping or other sharp sounds at all. The audio meter doesn’t move when I clap, and if I talk while clapping, my voice actually cuts out while the clap happens leading to my voice sounding distorted.

The strange part is that my microphone works perfectly in every other app I’ve tried, including Photo Booth and Discord, so it seems to be something specific to OBS. I’ve also tested with a completely different microphone (my phone), and the exact same thing happens, so I don’t think it’s an issue with the microphone itself.

I’ve already tried removing and recreating the audio source, checking that the correct input is selected, making sure there are no filters, changing the sample rate, using both Audio Input Capture and the global microphone setting, creating a fresh OBS profile, and checking the log, which shows the microphone initialises normally.

Has anyone come across anything like this before or have any ideas what else I could try? I’d really appreciate any suggestions. I’m also very new to OBS, so there’s every chance I’ve missed something obvious! If that’s the case, please feel free to point it out. Thanks so much!

 

[feli123]

I managed to figure it out! Turns out it was way more obvious than I thought

It turned out to be Voice Isolation on macOS - but the confusing part was that I couldn’t find the setting anywhere because I was screen sharing into OBS, so Control Centre was only showing the screen sharing options instead of the microphone options. As soon as I stopped screen sharing, the microphone settings appeared, I turned Voice Isolation off, and everything worked normally again!

Sorry for the confusion, but hopefully this might help if someone else runs into the same issue!

 

[AaronD]

Sorry I only just now saw this. But you did find the correct fix.

To add some more background and explain why the problem existed in the first place, you have to understand that the vast majority of computer users (not just OBS) don't know anything and just want to be understood clearly in a video conference. So they sit under a speaker in a hotel lobby, or don't turn their noisy fridge or HVAC off, or whatever, and if the system doesn't "just work" with that, they complain that it's "broken".

So the operating system, not OBS (as you've found), has a noise suppressor. Different OS's have different names for it, but that's what the audio industry calls it and what OBS calls its filter that does something similar. And it's on by default so the video call "just works", and it's not always obvious so that nosy management types don't disable it, forget what they did, and then blame Apple. (Micro$haft Windblows is the same way)

A noise suppressor is not magic, as you've found. It's clever, but not magic. Fundamentally, once signals are mixed, like from multiple sources in the air before they even get to the mic, they can't be unmixed. But the noise suppressor still tries to guess what's speech and what's not, so it can subtract its guess of what's not from its already-mixed input. Some things are harder to guess than others, so it doesn't work as well in those situations, but the various algorithms are getting better.

Technically, the concept works for any definable sound, but the vast majority of them are designed specifically for speech only, and so that's where the vast majority of refinement has been. Anything different is considered noise to be removed. So when people just slap one on, thinking it'll only take care of a ground loop buzz or background hiss, it often kills their music and sound effects too, because that's not speech. (remember the intended use case near the top of this post)

Why MacOS only enabled it for OBS and not the others, I don't know. Maybe that's the default, and you've had this problem before and disabled it for those apps but not OBS yet, and forgot in the meantime? Or maybe it has different classes of apps, and somehow the other conference apps weren't recognized as potentially having the same problem?
(Are most Discord users in a relatively quiet environment, for example, while OBS is assumed to be somewhere noisier?)