Question / Help Random mic echo in OBS recordings

[Phoebus]

Hi all,

I'm having an issue very similar to the one posted by Lawlzes in this thread. I get an echo that shows up at random times during my recordings / Twitch broadcasts. I know that the echo is happening somewhere in OBS, because I've recorded simultaneously in both OBS and Audacity, and the echo shows up only in OBS.

The echo can start at any time during the broadcast. Sometimes it doesn't show up for an hour, sometimes it is there immediately. There are even times when it will appear and then go away at some point.

I thought I'd finally figured this out yesterday when I realized that I had an audio input set in my webcam source (even though it was set to my desktop mic), so I disabled the input there and left just the mic input in Settings > Audio set to the mic. However the echo showed up immediately on a recording I did this morning, so I guess that wasn't it. I have all recording sources other than my mic set to disabled in Windows, and I don't have a browser open when streaming.

Here is a link to my most recent log file. Can we confirm here if I have multiple audio inputs active? https://gist.github.com/ab51a40d215c408d6c8a

Thanks for any help you can provide. This issue is driving me nuts!

 

[Lain]

I would probably have to see a video. I don't see any particular problem in the log. I do hope you're not watching your own stream streaming at all either.

 

[Phoebus]

I would probably have to see a video. I don't see any particular problem in the log. I do hope you're not watching your own stream streaming at all either.

You can hear the problem in my last broadcast here; the first instance starts at 8:50 and then clears up after 15:23; the second instance starts at 1:02:39 and continues to the end of the VOD. I don't have any browsers open while streaming.

 

[Phoebus]

Well I think I figured out what the issue is, but I don't understand why it made my mic echo.

I ran the OBS log analyzer on one of my recent logs, and it pointed out that 'some of my sources are taking a long time to load,' and that I should use a global source for that item instead. The only non-global source in my scene was a background image. So I made that global, and re-ran the log analyzer. I no longer got the 'slow sources detected' message. I've recorded about 6 hours of audio since doing this, and haven't seen any echo yet. Could this slow-loading image possibly have been causing the echo? Is the app sending that image data periodically even though it's not visible on screen? Does this make sense?