Snowblinded
New Member
So I've been involved in audio production for a couple of years, and with the new demand for streaming concerts I've started getting some requests to live stream concerts, particularly for acoustic/classical guitarists/ensambles. I have been using OBS Studio to stream these broadcasts to YouTube, and for the most part everything works exactly as I'd expect, but there is one issue that I've had with the software ever since I started using it: there appears to be some kind of volume attenuation that OBS is doing AFTER THE MIXING STAGE that makes the livestreams and subsequent video recordings almost unlistenably quiet in their final form.
Now I've done a fair amount of research, and the two things that everyone recommends for volume problems are using OBS' filters to add gain and add compression. The problem is that, if I am understanding things correctly, both of these effects are applied prior to the mixer (e.g. if I add 4db of gain to the signal, the mixer will show the transients as 4db higher than it was before) but my problem seems to occur between the mixer and the final recorded/streamed output level.
The reason that I beleive this to be true is because I used REAPER to do a sound check before the show, and, as is usual, when I set the gain up properly, whenever the signal clipped in my interface, it would also clip in REAPER, and if I have it set 2db below the clipping point in my interface, the WAV file of the recording will show the peaks at the same position. Then, when I made the jump to OBS, the gain level in my volume mixer shows the exact some gain level as REAPER did, only the final volume is significantly attenuated in comparison to REAPER. I know this to be the case because viewers were complaining about the volume throughout the broadcast, so I set the gain staging as hot as it could possibly go, to the point where OBS showed me clipping the signal three times during the broadcast, and yet if you listen to the broadcast ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgQ1dMrRto8&t=1408s ) even the loudest sections are comparatively quiet compared with other videos of people playing the acoustic guitar. To verify that this was not just a problem of lacking enough compression, I re-imported the OBS recording back into reaper, and, as I suspected, the final audio was nowhere near the 0db clipping point, as you can see in the attached screenshot.
I've been bashing my head against the wall trying to figure out a solution to this, but everything I read seems to indicate that the volume level shown in the mixer should be identical to that of the final audio, kind of like the Master Volume in a DAW, and that does not appear to be the case in my situation.
Now I've done a fair amount of research, and the two things that everyone recommends for volume problems are using OBS' filters to add gain and add compression. The problem is that, if I am understanding things correctly, both of these effects are applied prior to the mixer (e.g. if I add 4db of gain to the signal, the mixer will show the transients as 4db higher than it was before) but my problem seems to occur between the mixer and the final recorded/streamed output level.
The reason that I beleive this to be true is because I used REAPER to do a sound check before the show, and, as is usual, when I set the gain up properly, whenever the signal clipped in my interface, it would also clip in REAPER, and if I have it set 2db below the clipping point in my interface, the WAV file of the recording will show the peaks at the same position. Then, when I made the jump to OBS, the gain level in my volume mixer shows the exact some gain level as REAPER did, only the final volume is significantly attenuated in comparison to REAPER. I know this to be the case because viewers were complaining about the volume throughout the broadcast, so I set the gain staging as hot as it could possibly go, to the point where OBS showed me clipping the signal three times during the broadcast, and yet if you listen to the broadcast ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgQ1dMrRto8&t=1408s ) even the loudest sections are comparatively quiet compared with other videos of people playing the acoustic guitar. To verify that this was not just a problem of lacking enough compression, I re-imported the OBS recording back into reaper, and, as I suspected, the final audio was nowhere near the 0db clipping point, as you can see in the attached screenshot.
I've been bashing my head against the wall trying to figure out a solution to this, but everything I read seems to indicate that the volume level shown in the mixer should be identical to that of the final audio, kind of like the Master Volume in a DAW, and that does not appear to be the case in my situation.
