In reviewing the video for the last Carrion Crown stream, I was dismayed to discover that the audio was rather poor. In general, the volume was too low. My own voice was passable and could be understood, and some of the players were quiet but still workable. About half the table though was effectively speaking on mute, with very little to no sound. Part of this is naturally the quality of my equipment, but that isn’t really a fair assessment – most of the issue really has to do with how I tune the environment.
Mistake one is not having a reliable way to monitor/review or pre-balance the audio – I simply have no reliable way to listen to the sound and validate that all locations are clear and loud enough. About the only option I have right now is a live listener watching the stream, feeding feedback for adjustments. Not really practical given my audience of zero during a live event, but I will be working with my son to do a test stream before to run some configuration changes.
Mistake two was over estimating the volume levels – I proactively had reduced the gain on most of the microphones far too much. Even with decent arrangements and testing, the microphones were simply not recording any sound. This could be adjusted live with monitoring, but that then leads to mistake three.
Mistake three was audio cleanup – both at the microphones as well as in OBS. Both sets have the option to compress and clean up the audio – removing background noise and preventing major shifts in the quality and levels. Of course, without accurate testing, I can’t really identify where those improvements are needed, but I have a starting point based on some other YouTube channels, and should have some improvements.
I have seen thru many tutorials that audio is the most important aspect of the stream – most people will watch bad video, but they will turn out immediately if the audio is bad. As exciting (not) it is to watch a group play an RPG for 5 hours is, without audio, it is just watching a group sit around a table.
Fingers crossed, improvements are coming.
