Set up clean audio: microphone, desktop audio, filters and monitoring
Start with gain, not with filters
Set the physical gain on your microphone or audio interface so normal speech peaks around -12 dB to -6 dB in the OBS mixer, with headroom before 0 dB. Filters cannot recover a signal that is already clipped, and heavy software gain on a weak signal amplifies the noise floor along with your voice.
A filter chain that works
Right-click the microphone in the Audio Mixer and choose Filters. Order matters, because each filter processes what the previous one produced:
- Noise Suppression — the RNNoise method removes steady fan and hiss with little effect on speech; the speex method is lighter on CPU but more aggressive on the voice.
- Noise Gate — closes the channel between sentences. Set the close threshold below your quietest speech and the open threshold a few dB above it so words are not clipped off.
- Compressor — evens out level changes when you lean in or shout. A ratio around 4:1 with a few dB of output gain is a safe starting point.
- Limiter — a safety net at around -3 dB so a sudden laugh cannot clip the recording.
Desktop audio and separate tracks
Keep the game, music and voice on separate audio tracks when recording. In Settings → Output switch to Advanced mode, enable several audio tracks, then use the Advanced Audio Properties dialog to assign each source to its own track. The result is one file you can re-balance later, instead of a permanently mixed recording where loud music sits on top of your voice.
Monitoring without echo
Set the monitoring device in Settings → Audio → Advanced, then set each source to Monitor Off, Monitor Only or Monitor and Output in Advanced Audio Properties. Monitor through headphones. Monitoring through speakers feeds the sound back into the microphone and produces echo on the stream that you will not hear yourself.
Sync offset
If your voice lands slightly ahead of or behind the video, add a sync offset in milliseconds in Advanced Audio Properties rather than trying to fix it in the capture device. Cameras and capture cards introduce their own latency, so this offset is normal and only needs setting once per device.
Check before you go live
Record 60 seconds that includes quiet speech, loud speech, and the game at its noisiest. Play it back on headphones and on a phone speaker. Most audio problems are obvious in that test and invisible in the meters.