Mixer and OBS studio (Church Livestream)

[sir_emmy_uche]

Hello, please I'm new using obs and I'm having issues livestreaming my church service. The issue I'm having is with the audio. I'm collecting the audio from my church mixer which I'm to connect to my PC using USB sound card. Now, the audio coming from the mixer seems to be ok, however, once we start livestreaming (on YouTube), the sound is completely different. When the choristers are singing, the whole thing is just bad that you won't even know what's going on but if only one person is talking, it's still bearable but not the sound coming from the mixer. I don't know where the problem is coming from but I know it's not from the sound guy (mixer) as he's sending the same sound to our audio livestream (mixlr) and it's working fine there. I've tried disabling all the sound coming from the vidoe capture device and it's not fixing the issue. I also tried using an audio input capture device from the source it still didn't fix it. I don't know where I'm to go to just capture and use only the sound coming from the mixer for the livestream. Please any help is really appreciated

 

[ClarkC162]

What possible source for sound is there besides the output of the USB sound card? And what kind of USB sound card is it?

 

[PilotLight]

Hello! It may be that the issue is to do with "line level" audio output, assuming you are taking an analogue audio output from the mixer. Unfortunately in the audio world "line level" is not the same between professional and consumer equipment. The "stream mix" you are getting from the mixing desk is probably at +4dBu and your USB card may only be expecting -10dBu - ie: the signal is maybe too high voltage. The simple test is to get your sound guy to turn down the master volume considerably on your stream mix.

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

Ideally, your mixer has an option for a 'front of house' mix (ie speaker output) and an Aux(iliary) mix, which you configure to output to your stream. A good streaming audio mix will b different than the mix for an in-house audience (lots of House of Worship blogs, YouTube videos, etc. on why this is the case). Our old analog mixer has this and we definitely need to use it as certain things should NOT be amplified in-house, but needed to be mic'ed for livestreaming.
And then there is average/peak audio level, and typically a good idea to use audio compression on streamed audio

As PilotLight mentions, line level/settings can easily have an impact... As will your PC audio drivers configuration for a given audio input (like USB from mixer)... do NOT assume the default selections are the right ones. My PC has a selection for whether an audio input is Line Level or not

Best Practice is to ensure audio (and video) feeds working correctly at Operating System (OS) level FIRST
so Record that Audio Input from the mixer (default Windows Recorder is fine) and play back on decent headphones in a quiet room... I expect the audio will sound terrible... fix that [note, nothing to do with OBS Studio] ... which may involve the mixer output settings, associated driver settings, and basic OS audio settings (ex realtek audio drivers and software, if such on your system).

Then after audio has gotten to point of ok-to-pretty-good at Operating System level, then time to ensure in OBS Studio that Audio not peaking/distorting (hitting 0db) but high enough to be audible for stream audience (with typically terrible mobile device speakers)... and this is where (often) compression comes into play [such compression could be done in Mix for Aux mix, if mixer capable of such, or OBS Studio has a compression audio filter... but beware CPU impact if on an under-powered system.