Chapter 2 of 5
Sound matters more than picture
You can stream at 720p with a webcam from 2014 and build an audience. You cannot do it while people have to strain to understand you. Audio is the part of your stream that viewers experience as effort, and effort is what makes them leave.
The good news: almost all of it is free to fix.
Get closer
The single biggest improvement available to you costs nothing. Move the microphone closer to your mouth — a hand's width, not an arm's length.
Why it works: every microphone picks up your voice and the room at the same time. Halving the distance to your mouth makes your voice dramatically louder relative to the room, so you can turn the gain down, and everything that was not your voice gets quieter with it.
A boom arm is worth more than a better microphone, because it is what makes "close" sustainable. A microphone on a desk stand that you lean towards will drift back to arm's length within an hour.
Set the level properly, once
Two rules:
- Loud enough that you never have to shout to be heard. In your software, speaking normally should land comfortably in the middle of the meter, with your loudest laugh not hitting the top.
- Quiet enough that the loudest thing you do does not distort. Clipping cannot be repaired afterwards; it is gone.
Set it by speaking the way you speak when you are excited, not the way you speak when you are testing a microphone. Everyone tests politely and then streams at twice the volume.
The three filters worth having
Modern streaming software ships with everything you need. In order of importance:
- Noise suppression. Removes the steady background — fans, computer hum, air conditioning. Use the built-in one. It is good, and the difference on a hot day with the fans up is enormous.
- A noise gate. Mutes the microphone when you are not talking, so the room disappears between sentences. Set the threshold so that it opens when you speak normally and stays shut when you breathe. If it clips the start of your words, you have set it too aggressively.
- A compressor. Evens out the difference between your quiet voice and your loud one, so viewers stop reaching for the volume. Gentle settings are right; heavy compression makes you sound like a radio advert and brings the room noise up with it.
That is the whole chain. Everything beyond it is taste, and most of it makes things worse.
Stop your game drowning you out
Your voice should be clearly the loudest thing in the mix, and the gap should be bigger than feels right while you are playing. You know the game audio because you are inside it; a viewer only knows what reaches them.
Practical version: turn your game down in the stream mix until it feels slightly too quiet to you. That is roughly correct for everyone else. Music, if you use it, goes quieter still — it should be noticeable only when nobody is talking.
Keep them on separate tracks or sources so you can change one without the other. This also makes it possible to mute music for a VOD later, which future you will appreciate.
Listen to yourself, on a phone
The single most useful habit in this entire path: record a couple of minutes, then listen on your phone speaker at half volume while doing something else.
Not headphones. Your monitoring headphones are the least representative device in the building, because they flatter everything and you already know what you said.
You will hear the hum you have stopped noticing, the sibilance, the moment the game covered a sentence. Fix one thing. Repeat next month.
If you are buying something
In order of what actually changes the result:
- A boom arm, so the microphone can live close to your face.
- Some soft furniture — curtains, a rug, a duvet on a shelf behind you. Rooms with hard surfaces sound like bathrooms, and no filter fixes a room.
- A microphone, if the one you have is genuinely poor. A modest USB microphone at a hand's width beats an expensive one across the desk, every time.
Note that the first two are not microphones. That is the point.
Next: a scene layout you build once and stop thinking about.