Best OBS Audio Settings for Beginners in 2026 (No Plugins)

[00:02] how frustrating it can be not having good audio quality in your videos and live streams. After all, audio is probably the most important aspect when If that's not good, it can be close to impossible to retain viewers. That's why

[00:17] covering everything OBS audio from adding sources correctly, improving the quality of cheap microphones, balancing your game audio, and much more, all without plugins. All right, so jumping into my OBS project, all I've set up

[00:31] here is one scene with one source, that being the Elgato 4K S capture card, along with its audio that you see here in the mixer, which was added automatically when adding this video capture device source. The first thing

[00:44] we want to take a look at here are our global audio settings. So, to get to right-hand side and select the settings button. That's going to pop up this window, where you can go to the audio tab, and this is where you're going to

[00:57] find the global audio devices. Now, within this section, you're going to see two different types of audio, desktop audio and mic auxiliary audio. The desktop audio you may have enabled by default, but ideally, unless you just

[01:13] plan on capturing whatever audio flows through your desktop or your speakers, I would recommend disabling this because you're going to see later in this video how you can set granular audio controls based on the application that you want

[01:27] to pull audio from versus just pulling all of the audio that might be playing through the computer. As for the mic auxiliary audio device, this is where you can select your microphone. So, in this case, we're going to go with the

[01:39] cheap microphone that I plugged in here, that being the Tonor TC310 USB mic. So, any additional microphones I'm planning on adding, so we will select apply and

[01:51] okay, and then you'll see within the mixer here my microphone audio source added. Now, one key thing to understand here are the global audio devices versus your source audio devices. Since the microphone here that I added falls under

[02:05] global audio devices, any additional scenes that I add and I eventually switch to, that microphone will follow in each of those scenes. Now, the Elgato in each of those scenes. Now, the Elgato 4K S audio that you see above that, that

[02:19] is from a particular source within this scene. So, that will not carry to the other scenes that might be in my OBS project. Now, right now you can see the decibel level or the volume output set to the max for both of these audio

[02:34] sources. And that's not how you would typically want to keep it. As a general with a gameplay and microphone audio source, the game audio should not stretch into the yellow area. And ideally, you'd want to test this out

[02:47] while playing a game to see how loud it will truly get. But, you want to have that game audio coming in at the minus 25 to minus 20 decibel levels. And then looking at the microphone, first things first, you're going to want to have this

[02:59] about 6 in to a foot away from your mouth. That way you can get the best sounding audio quality because if it's too far away, your mic audio is just not going to sound very good. I also highly recommend to get a microphone stand.

[03:12] This is what I have my Elgato Wave: 3 on microphone up off the desk so that you don't hear those bumps and boops that accidentally. And you can much more easily control how far away the

[03:27] microphone is from your mouth. The one I have here is from FIFINE and I will link it out. The next thing you're going to want to do with your microphone is physically adjust the gain knob so that you have it comfortably set and not

[03:40] peaking on the microphone itself. And I have mine set pretty comfortably here. I don't want it to to max out like that. See, that's that's peaking like crazy. So, now I'm going to go into the software and reduce the gain just a

[03:53] little bit until we are consistently hitting the yellow with this microphone. That's pretty good. Before we mess with any settings, take a look at the environment that your microphone is sitting in. Are you in a space with a

[04:06] lot of hard surfaces like a hardwood floor? You can improve the audio by just changing what is around you in the room. Like add soft objects, add carpets, add couches. All of these types of things can reduce the echo and the overall

[04:21] best effort with that, there's some great filters that you can add to make your microphone sound studio level even if it isn't. So, to do that, we're going to go to our microphone audio source in our mixer, right click, and then go to

[04:34] filters. And this is where we're going to be able to add these OBS filters that are built right within the software. Let's click on the plus button and the first filter we are going to add is noise suppression. Select okay, and the

[04:49] method we're going to use is RNNoise, which is good quality, more CPU usage, but if you have a, you know, relatively newer, modern PC, this really doesn't take up much resources at all, and it does a really good job at getting rid of

[05:03] any remaining droning or fan sounds in your background. The next audio source we're going to add is the noise gate. Select that, select okay. The purpose of this filter is to mute your microphone audio if it drops below a certain

[05:17] decibel level. This is great for when you stop talking, so background noises or droning sounds won't come through the microphone when you're not speaking. Now, the numbers that they give you here are a great starting point, but since

[05:29] I've already tested this out with this cheaper microphone, I found that the cheaper microphone, I found that the best numbers for me are minus 43 for the close threshold, and then open threshold 38. And the reason why I pushed these

[05:42] down is because at the higher points that were set by default, I experienced some clipping in the audio due to the fact that a louder volume of sound needed to come through in order to open up this gate. So, if you're experiencing

[05:55] audio that doesn't sound quite right when you start talking or end talking, tweak these to be lower, but not low enough to where background noise starts coming through. The next filter you guys can add is the three-band equalizer. Go

[06:08] ahead and select okay, and the purpose of this filter is to adjust the tone, shape, and character of your voice. So, if you want to get that more radio or high-quality podcasting sound, this is where you can make that magic happen.

[06:22] to set this at is having the high frequency at about two. The mid frequency, I keep that as is, and then I put the low frequency also at around

[06:34] two. You can feel free to play around with this, but I would recommend keeping the shape the way that I have it. The next filter we're going to want to add here is the compressor. The purpose of this filter is to reduce the microphone

[06:47] the microphone to prevent it from peaking or clipping, but at the same time boost the audio if you are talking very quietly into the microphone so that it can still be heard. So, let's start here by looking at the threshold. This

[07:03] is how much we want the audio to be reduced once it hits that maximum point. between minus 15 and minus 20 decibel levels. I liked minus 18, so we're just

[07:15] going to keep that. Looking at the ratio is how much we want that audio to be minimized or compressed once it does hit this threshold. 10 is definitely too high. It should really be between three to four. I'm going to go with three here

[07:30] for my ratio. The output gain down here boosts the level of the audio after the anywhere between three and six is pretty good. I'm going to go with about four. that as default. One more filter we want to add to the microphone, so let's

[07:46] select the plus button, and this time we are going to add a limiter. Select okay. The way that this filter works is literally in its name, as it limits the level of audio that is allowed to be hit. So, whatever you set here, once it

[08:00] hits that point, any audio that tries to go above it is going to be automatically three to minus six is a good range for this, and possibly a little bit more, depending on how you've set the gain of

[08:14] your microphone up on the hardware itself. But for this microphone, I'm comfortable with it there. Let's go ahead and close this out, and I think now we got to hear a little compare and contrast test. This is a test of the

[08:27] Tonor microphone without any filters applied whatsoever. Listen to the audio. How does it sound? Do you like the way it sounds naturally without any filters microphone sounds like with the filters that we just added in OBS applied to the

[08:42] microphone. How do you like the quality? Does it sound better than what it which one you think is the best in the comment section below. Now up next, I'm specific application audio sources to your OBS project. That means Discord

[08:57] chat, Spotify, your browser sources. So, to do that within one of your scenes, in the sources section, go ahead and select the plus button, and then here you're going to want to add an application audio capture source. Once you select

[09:10] that, we can name it Spotify, for example. Select the window drop down and find the corresponding app that you're looking for. In my case, it's Spotify Premium, so I'm going to select that. Window match priority, you can keep the

[09:22] same. Select okay. Now if I play some audio through that source, you're going to see that it is coming through. Now just like we did earlier in the video, audio out as well. You don't want to have your music blaring all over your

[09:35] gameplay and your own voice. That's just not going to sound good. So, I put together a more detailed guideline for where you want your audio to fall under depending on the source type that it is. Your music, you want to put that on the

[09:48] lowest end of the spectrum, somewhere around the -40 to -35 dB level at the maximum. Your gameplay audio should be able to be heard over the music. Discord gameplay, and then the sound coming from

[10:02] your microphone, your own voice, should be heard over everything because you are the star of the show. Just as another reminder, make sure it's not peaking share with you guys a very handy audio trick that a lot of people aren't aware

[10:16] if you go into your advanced audio properties, so you can just right-click anywhere within the mixture, select advanced audio properties, and you right-hand side where you see tracks. Under that heading, you're going to see

[10:29] six different tracks across each of the audio sources within your OBS project. If you have an audio source selected under any of these track numbers, the audio will be recorded as a part of that track. Now, if I don't want the audio

[10:45] say track number one, I don't want Spotify audio, then I can uncheck track number one across from this Spotify audio source, and then if I close this out and I go to my settings, and I go to

[11:00] output, and let's just go to advanced real quick. Here within the stream settings, you can see the audio track that will be utilized for recording to the stream itself. Maybe for the stream, I'm okay with having the Spotify audio

[11:15] in the track, but for my VOD, I want to have that to be cleaner. I don't want to case, we're going to check off Twitch VOD track, and that is going to be track it. This same approach can be applied to recordings as well. As you can see, we

[11:31] can choose a specific audio track for that. It is very handy, to say the least, and keeps you out of copyright trouble. The next audio trick I have here for you guys is listening to your gameplay audio from the computer. Give

[11:43] it a try to have your audio go over HDMI. That's how I have my audio coming through for my setup right now, and the beauty of this is that I can actually hear my gameplay audio here while being able to hear alerts, Discord chat,

[11:58] Spotify, all the same time. So, to do that, we're going to go back to our advanced audio properties, and for the Elgato 4K S capture card that I have the game audio coming over HDMI on, I can set the audio monitoring to be monitored

[12:13] and outputted. So, that way it's still being recorded as a part part of the stream or the video, but I also get to hear it at the same time with a pair of into the computer. If you're not hearing your audio, just make sure to

[12:27] double-check your operating system-level audio settings to ensure your audio is being routed to the correct location. Additionally here, I have also seen where people's capture card audio is delayed coming into their computer, so

[12:40] it's literally not synced up. So, back in your advanced audio properties, section. So, under that, this is where you can set, in milliseconds, so 1

[12:52] second equals 1,000 milliseconds, you want to set how much the delay is. There you guys have it. Those are all of your basic need-to-know audio settings within OBS Studio to get your audio sounding better for your videos and live streams.

[13:07] know in the comment section below. Like the video, subscribe if you're new if you're struggling to get your game and chat audio from the PlayStation 5 into your capture card into OBS Studio, this video help you out here. Thanks for

[13:22] watching. I'll see you all in the next one. Peace.