How To Get The Best Sound When Live Streaming Events

Jim Wilkens, Lead Audio Engineer at AVFX shares how to get the best sound when live streaming events. A live stream event can take many different forms and Jim discusses several strategies to get the best sound quality for your live stream event.

Below is Video Transcription

There are several simple strategies that the live sound engineer might use to get good sound out over the live corporate event video stream. The most basic would be just simply to take an output from the console, patch it into the live streaming encoder and it gets all your microphones you’re getting out over there, everybody’s hearing what’s being said.

Now, beyond that, in order to get people more engaged with what’s going on as they’re watching this live stream, you want to give them a sense of what it’s like being there.

To do that you need a more even mix than what’s happening in the room. In the room, it’s more dynamic. Video playback and any possible live performance. Things will be loud, speeches will be quieter but on the live streams the audio needs to be more even, so what the live engineer would do a separate mix that goes out over the live stream but that follows along with
What’s happening live in the room.

The next thing that I would typically do is to add audience mics, microphones that just are there to pick up the sounds made by the audience and it would only go out over the live stream.

Now, if you’re doing a two-way conference or if you’re having someone calling in, that needs to hear the live stream and then respond — not to get too technical but your engineer needs to do a mix-minus — a basic audio technique that most engineers know how to do.

And then finally the ultimate strategy for high-quality audio for your important webcasts with live music performances, you’ve got a lot of audio cues and a lot of different sort of complex things happenings would be to consider having a separate console and a separate engineer just to mix for the live stream.

These are things that I think about when I’m planning a live streaming event.