Sound familiar?
Your room is quiet, but your stream isn’t.
Hiss that won’t go
A steady hiss or hum sits under your voice, even with nothing running.
Noise that swells
The noise gets louder in the gaps, every time you stop talking.
Filters that wreck your voice
Noise suppression removes the noise but leaves you sounding robotic or underwater.
How I fix it
A live remote session. You stay at your desk, and I work on your computer with you.
I call you on WhatsApp
I connect and listen
We find what’s adding the noise
A real fix
A new podcaster with noise and echo, despite acoustic panels.
The problem
She was recording on a MacBook with a Blue Yeti. Her audio in OBS had loud background noise and a hollow echo, even after acoustic panels and several noise filters from YouTube tutorials.
What I did
- Switched off the OBS filters she’d added, so we could hear the raw mic.
- Found the Yeti’s gain at zero with macOS boosting the input by 18dB, which dragged up the noise. We removed the boost and turned the mic’s gain up.
- Talked her through switching the Yeti to cardioid, and we angled it so she spoke into the front, not the top.
The result
Result: the background noise and echo were gone without any OBS filters. Her review: “I highly recommend him for all your audio needs!”
What it costs
No packages to decode, no upsells. Pick the one that fits and book it.
Diagnosis
Free
Send me your audio clips. I’ll listen properly and tell you what’s wrong and how I’d fix it — back with you by the next working day, UK hours.
Send me your audioLive Diagnostic
£90
A focused, one-hour, screen-shared session to find and kill a specific problem. Mic suddenly not recording, distortion out of nowhere, routing that’s blocking your chat, software that won’t behave. Most issues are gone inside the session.
Book a Live DiagnosticFull Studio Setup
£180
Around two hours. I take control and configure your whole rig from scratch — hardware and software, gain staging, mic positioning, routing, the lot. For new gear, a new room, or a setup that’s never quite worked properly. You end up with a system that just runs.
Book a Full Studio SetupPriced in GBP. International clients welcome — your bank converts at checkout.
Before you book
The questions streamers ask me most.
Do I need a noise suppression plugin?
Sometimes, as a final touch. But if the noise is being boosted further up the chain, a plugin only hides it and costs you voice quality. I fix the cause first.
Will acoustic panels fix it?
They help with echo, not hiss. In one session the panels were up and the noise was still there, because the mic gain was at zero and the Mac was boosting it.
What if the noise swells when I stop talking?
That usually means an auto-gain feature is on. On one 4th Gen Focusrite Scarlett it took a button on the front panel, not the software, to turn it off.
Takes less than 2 minutes.
Related: Mic too quiet in OBS · Best mic settings for OBS · Echo in OBS with VoiceMeeter