Having the same exact problem, did that and it didn't work for me. It's been driving me crazy and no one has any answers for it. This is probably a shot in the dark too since this thread is a couple years old.
When most people say "distorted", what usually happening is that something is too loud at some point in the processing, and it's getting clipped at the largest value that that signal path can support.
You can't fix that later in the chain; you have to turn it down at or before the point where it's clipping...which means you kinda have to *know* or find the point where it's clipping so you can turn it down before and up after by the same amount to keep the same volume at the end. *That*, is called "gain structure", and it's a major part of any media rig.
This rig, for example, runs every signal through 4 different volume controls:
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- Preamp (top row of knobs): boosts a "stiff" but small signal from each mic, up to what the rest of the processing can work with.
- Channel fader (white): controls the individual volume of that mic in the mix.
- Submix fader (red): controls a group of mics that are assigned to it. So if you have a really good harmony that you don't want to mess up, you can have one fader for all of those and nothing else. And another fader for another group of things. I use them to organize the band: vocals, guitars, keys, bass, kick, other drums, MC, and playback. The last two have some special processing that I won't get into here.
- Master fader (yellow): controls the volume of *everything* as it leaves the board.
If the preamp is too high, for example, then I can't just pull a fader down to compensate. It'll still be distorted, just at a lower volume. But if I turn the preamp down and push the channel fader up by the same amount, it "cleans up" and I get to keep the same volume in the room.
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So far, this explanation has been entirely in the "live" mindset, where you don't know what's coming and so you need to leave some headroom to give some unexpected peaks somewhere to go without clipping. But the "mastered" or "broadcast" mindset is different.
The standard for distribution, whether it's vinyl, cassette tape, radio, TV, streaming, or whatever, is that the medium is actually pretty bad. So you want to run as hot as you possibly can, to make your audience turn their volume controls down, which serves to reduce the noise inherent to the medium. Plus, you're supposed to know *exactly* what's coming anyway, because you've tamed it by then, and so it shouldn't be all that hard to push it up to *exactly* full-scale and never go over.
That's easier to do for a studio recording than it is to do live. But the "loudness war" has caused the same tool and technique to be used in both places anyway: HEAVY COMPRESSION.
For my own stuff, I actually use a really-soft-knee limiter (outside of OBS), and "ride the knee" as a sort-of "auto-ratio". A softer input doesn't compress as much and so it sounds more natural, while a loud input squashes hard. Not much actual change in volume, but the tonal quality of a voice changes a LOT, which still carries the sense of volume even though the speakers are moving close to the same amount in both cases.
Follow that with a hard-knee limiter at full-scale or maybe -1dBFS, which hardly ever does anything. But it's there as a "safety net".
My meter in OBS, which comes after everything, is completely full, and sometimes tells me I'm clipping, but it always sounds clean. The clipping *indicator* has to use a slightly lower threshold than actually clipping, just to make it activate at all. Know how your gear works and how to set it, and then trust that it does what you set it to do.
