---
title: 'Your Microphone Sounds Terrible, Here''s Why!'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=qkLygm3Pz40'
video_id: 'qkLygm3Pz40'
date: 2026-09-09
duration_sec: 913
channel: 'Stream Scheme'
---

# Your Microphone Sounds Terrible, Here's Why!

> Source: [Your Microphone Sounds Terrible, Here's Why!](https://youtube.com/watch?v=qkLygm3Pz40)

## Summary

This video is a comprehensive guide to improving microphone audio quality for streamers and content creators. The presenter demonstrates that a $50 USB microphone can sound as good as a $1000 XLR setup when properly configured, covering key aspects like mic placement, gain staging, and filter usage.

### Key Points

- **The $50 vs $1000 Microphone Challenge** [00:01] — The video opens with a blind test comparing a $50 FIFINE K688 USB microphone with a $1000 XLR setup, claiming most viewers won't notice a difference if the mic is set up correctly.
- **Three Key Factors for Great Sound** [00:29] — The presenter outlines three essential elements: microphone placement, microphone alignment, and a secret third point revealed at the end of the video.
- **First Problem: Actually Using Your Microphone** [00:55] — Many creators use their webcam's built-in mic instead of their dedicated microphone. The presenter shares an example of a Twitch partner with 800 viewers who was unknowingly using their webcam mic.
- **Connecting and Selecting the Correct Microphone** [01:19] — Plug the microphone directly into the motherboard's rear USB port, then verify in OBS and Windows sound settings that the correct input device is selected.
- **Importance of Proximity** [02:11] — Moving closer to the microphone dramatically improves sound quality. Most creators place their mic too far away, leading to poor audio and increased background noise.
- **Finding the Correct Side of the Microphone** [03:02] — For the K688, the capsule is at the top, not the side. Other mics may have indicators. Use OBS monitoring to find the sweet spot by tapping or speaking to different sides.
- **Optimal Mic Positioning** [03:45] — Place the mic about a fist's distance away, tilted down towards your mouth, avoiding direct nose and breath hits. The included windscreen helps with plosives.
- **Understanding Gain and Levels** [04:11] — Aim for levels between -10 and -6 dB in OBS. Avoid hitting 0 dB, which causes clipping and distortion that cannot be fixed later.
- **The Deception of Levels** [05:18] — Levels can be misleading due to multiple gain stages in the chain (mic, Windows, software). Distortion can occur earlier in the chain but only become apparent in OBS.
- **Fixing Gain at the Source** [06:14] — Check for a physical gain knob on the microphone. Set it to 90-100% first, then adjust Windows input volume to achieve the target levels.
- **Filters: Limiter and Compressor** [07:47] — A limiter prevents output from exceeding a set dB level but does not prevent clipping. A compressor reduces volume differences between quiet and loud sounds. The limiter should be at the bottom of the filter chain.
- **Overprocessing: The Noise Gate** [09:38] — New creators often overuse filters. The noise gate is commonly misused; it only opens when audio exceeds a threshold, but it doesn't remove background noise during speech.
- **Best Solution: Eliminate the Noise Source** [11:15] — The best way to reduce background noise is to remove the source (e.g., move a fan, use a shock mount). Digital noise suppression should be a last resort.
- **Noise Suppression Filter** [12:40] — Use noise suppression sparingly (e.g., -30 dB) to avoid artifacts. It removes white noise but not transient sounds like keyboard clicks or voices.
- **Expander and EQ** [13:37] — An expander is the opposite of a compressor, making quiet sounds quieter. EQ is optional; a simple three-band EQ with slight high and low boost and mid cut is a good start.
- **Reveal: Both Clips Were the $50 Microphone** [14:30] — The entire video was recorded on the FIFINE K688. The first clip sounded worse due to incorrect setup, while the second followed the guide and sounded better.

### Conclusion

With proper setup—correct placement, gain staging, and minimal filter use—a budget USB microphone can rival professional XLR setups. The key is to focus on the fundamentals rather than expensive gear.

## Transcript

I'm about to play two audio clips for you. I need you to pick out which one is the $1,000 XLR microphone setup and which is the $50 FlyFind K688 USB kit, which I bought last night but have been using and recommending for over two years now.
I am confident you will not be able to tell the difference because audio quality, despite what every big influencer says, comes down to just three key things that I will teach you today and I promise will make your microphone and you sound beautiful.
These three things are microphone placement, microphone leveling, and of course, a secret third thing that I'll explain at the end of the video. Why? Because retention. This is Audio Clip 1. Do you believe this is a $50 microphone kit, or is it the $1,000 microphone setup?
Thank you to Fly Fine for sponsoring this video. This is Audio Clip 2. Do you believe this is a $50 microphone, or is it the $1,000 microphone? The first problem we need to correct with your microphone is going to sound silly, but we need to make sure you're actually using your microphone.
You see, I joined a friend's stream the other day, and they are a Twitch partner. In fact, they had 800 viewers at the time of your joining, and they sounded like shit. So I asked, hey, are you using your expensive RGB covered fancy microphone that you have
in front of you, or is that your webcam? They read the message, checked, and guess what? It was their fucking webcam microphone. To confirm this, we're going to first plug our microphone in, preferably to the back of the computer directly to the motherboard, and then check two places.
First, open OBS, or if you like to torture yourself, Streamlabs. Go to Settings, go to Audio, and make sure your mic auxiliary input you're using for your microphone is set to whatever microphone you're using. For example, mine says 5-line right here.
If you can't tell which microphone is which, all you have to do is pick the one you think is most likely, hit Apply, and then tap the microphone until you see Levels coming up in OBS. other place you're going to want to confirm is your Windows sound settings. You'll want your
default input to be that fancy microphone you bought and not your webcam or laptop microphone. So go to Windows settings, go to sound, go down to input and select the correct microphone. And with that, now we can jump into placement. This is so important. Watch this. As I move around or
away from this very lovely, beautiful microphone that I'm using, you're going to hear that my audio quality aggressively changes. This is because placement of your microphone and how close it is to you that proximity is the most important part about getting good quality audio. Yet
it's the thing most creators seem to skip, or actively hurt themselves because they don't like having a microphone in frame for some reason. Shit, I know a guy who bought a $300 microphone and then placed it behind his monitor, and because the microphone was so far away
and blocked by a monitor, he had to push the gain really high to make it louder, which isn't going to just raise your voice, because that's not how microphones work. Instead, it will raise all your background noise. You know what?
It'll sound like this. Let me show you. Don't I sound like absolute ass now? Like, what the fuck, dude? Why did you think this was going to be how it works? So let's fix this. First, we need to get our microphone nice and close to us, and then we need to figure out which side of the microphone
to actually speak into. What do you think a microphone like the K688? You can actually slide the windsock off, and when you slide it off, you can see right here at the top where it focuses, there's the capsule right there.
It's not on the sides. it's right on the top and because I can see that capsule and how it's aimed out at the top of it I know that's where I need to speak into. Now other microphones might have a little light or a logo to indicate or if there's nothing you can turn them on change OBS audio to monitoring so you can hear
your voice and then speak or tap different sides until you come out the clearest like I was doing before when I moved around my microphone like this. Once you've found the correct side however Well, personally, I like to make a fist.
I place my mic that far away, and then I just tilt it down and aim it up at my mouth but carefully make sure my nose and my breath aren lapping it directly That why I also like this windsock that comes with the Fifine K688 And once you got your
microphone nice and close, you're going to notice you're probably way too loud all of a sudden, which makes sense because it's able to pick you up properly. This is a good problem to have because now we can level or adjust the gain on your microphone, dialing you in to sound crisp,
while removing the background noise naturally by lowering the gain. But what the hell are levels? Well, when you look at OBS or any editing software or a mixer or really anything to do with audio, you'll see audio levels like this with numbers along them.
If you want to know how loud your audio truly is, never trust your headphones because they're full of little liars and instead always use your level meters. Now, the quick way to understand what these levels are trying to tell you is that if you make a very loud noise
and reach 0 dB, aka the very top of the meter where it's full on red, the very top, you will peak at the peak of the meter. Peaking means distorting your audio, aka sounding like wet hot ass. Once you've distorted your audio and recorded it, you can't undistort it.
So if you peak, that is ruining your audio. You can't fix this in post. As a creator, you want your OBS audio level to reach roughly minus 10 dB to minus 6 dB before adding any filters or gain in post-production,
which, don't worry, I will teach you how to do that later in this video as well. The goal is for your audio to sit at the top of the yellow, lightly into the red, which will give you some nice headroom for big sounds, like screaming at a scary moment in a horror game, or pretending to laugh at an untidy joke just because the guy is a tier 3 subscriber.
But there is a problem. You see, these levels might be lying to you as well. I see a lot of creators struggle with these levels because it says they're not peaking. Maybe it'll say they're stuck at minus 6 naturally, so it should sound great.
But the audio sounds distorted, like they are peaking. This is because these days we've overcomplicated our audio setup. You see, audio signals travel through different devices, software, and all sorts of things, and each of those places will apply their own settings.
I'm going to speak into my microphone. It could peak in the microphone and then go to Windows. Windows, it could peak in there and then send it off to some other software, like Elgato Wave or SteelSeries Sonar, or even directly to OBS.
It could peak in any of those places, but you only notice it finally when you get it to OBS. So what do you do? maybe you try and lower the gain inside OBS because that's where you think it's peaking.
But the distortion happened earlier in the chain, so you're not fixing it. You're just making the peaked, distorted audio quieter in OBS. We need to fix the peaking earlier in the chain. First thing you want to do is check if your microphone has a knob or gain control physically on it.
This knob should almost always be either maxed out or sitting at 90%, and it's the first thing we are going to adjust. One of the reasons I love the K688 is that it does have knobs for both gain and headphone monitoring.
And the great thing is they slide smoothly, which doesn't seem like it's that important. However, if I'm adjusting my gain or my headphones through my microphone while I'm recording, I don't want clicking sounds from buttons.
So a sliding knob is key. Once you've set your physical knob, from there we're going to go to our Windows audio settings, hit test, and really just go for it. And what I want you to be looking for is in OBS, it should be reaching that minus 10 to minus 60 B.
And then inside your Windows audio settings, you should be reaching maybe 70%, 80% when the test is done. If you aren't, you likely need to go back a few steps and go through these again. Either get your microphone closer, project your voice more, double down, check those knobs are already twisted up,
or go back to Windows and add just a bit more volume to the input. And once you're pretty confident about it, one of the best things you can do is actually just simply do a quick recording inside OBS and then take that recording over into any decent editing software listen back to it with headphones on while looking at the levels inside the editing software and very quickly you be able to see and hear what the problem is to adjust perfectly
Now we need to cover filters, specifically how your use of filters is likely making your audio sound far worse. I want to start with just two filters to control gain or volume. First, the easy option, a limiter.
This will cap your audio at a certain degree to avoid you becoming too loud and blowing your viewers ears out. Now, listen carefully, this doesn't prevent peaking. If you scream, it can still distort and you can still peep. It just caps the output of the audio so that when it reaches the viewer, it won't be louder than what you set.
If we go to OBS, right-click our microphone audio, click filters, click this little plus sign, and then select limiter, we get two options. First is threshold. This is what loudness the limiter will stop you going over.
And next is release, which is how long it takes to stop locking your audio. The default is fine for most people, but a key part of using this limiter is that it should always be at the bottom of the OBS filter list,
because the filters apply in a chain from top to bottom, and you want the limiter to apply last. Now, if you're a bit more confident, you could use a compressor instead, but this video is mostly for beginners,
so I will simply say this filter works differently to a limiter. It will essentially boost all of your audio using this setting here, the output gain slider, But if you reach the gain threshold, which you can see and set here, it will then lower all of the loud audio down.
This will avoid huge differentials between quiet and loud moments in your audio. If you want a better understanding of this, I will link directly to the official OBS explanation on the tool, and show you my personal compression settings that I start with, and tend to stick with unless I get really busy playing and start tweaking.
I know this might be getting dense, but I have really important tips coming up soon with Sultans, so stay tuned for that. First, let's talk about something small but very annoying. New streamers and creators keep overproducing their audio.
You see, the rule of filters is that you should always be tweaking gently, subtly, and in a way that nobody would ever really notice. The moment you go overboard with any filter, whether it is an equalizer, a voice mode, noise suppression, a limiter, or a noise gate, you'll start to have major problems.
The most common version of this, since most of you likely aren't using EQ yet, is actually with your noise suppression and your noise gate, because you just don't understand really what they do. Take a noise gate, for example. To add this, you go to Audio, right-click, Filters, Add Filter, Add Noise Gate.
Make sure this is early on in the chain of the filter near the top as well. Now, this gate is where you set a dB limit, otherwise known as an open threshold. If sound reaches that threshold, it opens the gate and lets the audio through.
It also has a closed threshold, which helps define what is background noise. If you want to eliminate background noise from when you aren't talking, you'll add this and monitor your audio. You then need to set your open threshold. To do this, start talking like you normally would on stream
and see where the levels are. Put the open threshold just a bit below where your levels are ending up so when you speak, you are hitting the open threshold. For example, I kind of like to go with a minus 20 or a minus 17 because sometimes I start talking quietly and ramp myself up.
Now, this doesn't mean anything that is quieter than the limit you just set won't be sent. If I said, hey, it is open, and while it's open, all of the sounds being picked up by my microphone will transmit, even the quiet ones.
I think the best way to understand this is imagine a noise gate is a dam full of water. When the dam opens, everything flows through, the fish, the junk, everything, not just the water. So what would we do if we were trying to eliminate background noise while we were speaking?
Well, that's where we start to get a little bit difficult. You see when it comes to eliminating background noise the best advice anyone can give you is to level your microphone properly with good placement like we have been covering in this video I not sure if you guys can hear it right now I going to know once I get this into editing software but my two daughter is screaming let it go
outside of my office door. I'm going to say that I'm confident you cannot hear her because I have set this Firefly K688 up properly. But if that proper setup doesn't work, the next best thing is simply remove the source of the noise. Seriously, rather than pushing and pulling
your audio digitally and risking distorting it with filters, just remove the issue from your room if you can. If you have a fan in your office like this one, just get it further away. Maybe set your aircon to quiet mode, or get a microphone arm like the one that
came with the FlyFind K688 that has shock absorbers and better reach, so you can get your microphone away from that fucking mechanical gamer keyboard you overpaid for, and does it help you do better at League of Legends? Sorry, that might be a personal issue. But
of course, you can't always remove something. Like I said, my daughter was right outside, She's not going anywhere. But I also live in Australia in Queensland, where it reaches 38 degrees Celsius with 87% humidity on most normal days.
It's like walking through a thick bowl of... I was going to say something bad there, but I'll say soup. I need my aircon or my fan next to me sometimes, or else I will die while I am recording or streaming. So I add a different filter, no noise gate.
Instead, we'll be adding a noise suppression filter. The bad noise might be gone, but my voice is also going to be digitally altered by doing this.
I will only add noise suppression very lightly. The reason is because if you push this too hard, it will start to strip your voice away. And if you're a creator with a higher-pitched voice, or you've noticed that maybe sometimes when you scream or get really loud, your audio just completely cuts out, that is this filter causing the problem.
When you reach those to the high end, for some reason, this filter will remove you as well. That said, the biggest mistake with noise suppression is thinking it is designed to remove all types of background noise,
when the reality is noise suppression just removes white noise, like humming or fans. It will not remove the keyboard clacking sound or my daughter screaming, let it go, outside. For those sorts of background noise, we would use something called an expander filter instead of noise suppression,
and potentially even instead of a noise gate. In short, an expander is the opposite of a compressor. It sort of takes the quiet sounds and makes them quieter, and just leaves those louder sounds being pushed up by things like the compressor.
The expander is much more complicated but much more powerful than noise gate and noise suppression. I personally recommend just using the presets in OBS if you aren't very audio savvy. And finally, EQ. I think most people don't need to mess around with EQ.
Most of your voices will sound just fine, but if you really want to start, I think start simply. Just go to OBS and add a three band simple EQ. Raise a little bit of the highs, raise a little bit of the lows, and then just drop down some of those midtones.
That'll take away the muddiness in the middle of the voice while adding depth and trickiness to the highs and lows. And if you want to learn more about EQ, you're going to need to kind of start really deep diving into audio frequencies. Don't just copy someone else's settings.
But with that kids, it's time for you to guess which mic is the expensive one. Was it microphone clip one or was it microphone clip two? This is audio clip 1. Do you believe this is a $50 microphone kit? This is audio clip 2. Do you believe this is a $50 microphone?
That's right! They are, of course, both the FlyFind K688. In fact, this entire video has been on FlyFind K688. You can tell because they both have the same ring stock on. The reason one of them sounded worse was because I was sitting slightly too far away,
I'd set my game wrong, and the other was just following this exact guide with a little bit of EQ at the end. So, thank you to FlyFind for sponsoring this video and for making one of my favourite microphones ever. You can check them out with the link in the description right now and get yourself set
up.