Speaker 1: Does your live stream sound like this? Do you want it to sound more like this?

Speaker 2: Hello. I'm Stephen Ballast. Welcome to my channel, where I explore worship technology solutions. Lots of churches have started live streaming over the past couple years. And after the dust settles from setting up cameras and video switchers and encoders, you might be listening to your stream and thinking, hmm, that isn't how we sound in the room. Or do we really sound that bad? I'm going to go out on a limb here and say the audio quality of your live stream is actually more important than your video quality. Think about it. If the audio is good, people will watch and engage with something, even if the video quality isn't great. Maybe it's just a single camera at the back of the room. But no matter how good your video quality is, with cinematic cameras, great lighting, multi-camera setups, if the audio is bad, people aren't going to enjoy watching. So this video is part one of at least a five-part series, where I'm going to show you how you can make your live stream sound better. First in this video, we're going to talk about why a live stream mix has different requirements than a house mix and what you can do about it. Then in the next video, I'll walk you through how to actually physically set up an isolated mix for your stream. Then I'm going to get really specific about how I set up my DAW for live mixing. We'll look at some plugins and how Waves plugins stack up against free plugins. And what I show you might not be the answer you think I'm going to give in that video. Then finally, how do you make your live stream audio loud enough for your viewers on their devices at home and maintain a consistent volume? If any of those topics interest you, be sure and subscribe to my channel so you don't miss any of those videos as they come out. Let's talk about why a live stream mix has different mix requirements than your house mix. And then at the end, we'll take that knowledge and apply it to some strategies for creating a great sounding live stream mix. If we think about two different listeners, we have a person in our room sitting with all the rest of our congregation. And then we have our live stream listener. The person in the room is hearing what's going on through the sound system with the mix that's coming from our front of house mixer, while the person at home is listening on a device that could be a phone, tablet, TV, headphones, whatever it is. These two people hear what's happening in the room very differently. And that creates different requirements for these two mixes. First let's look at the sound system and the device, whatever that is. The speakers in your room produce a very wide range of volume. When your band is playing, it could be 80, 85, 90, maybe even 95 dB of sound reaching the person in the audience. Then when your pastor is speaking, you'll probably be anywhere from 60 to 70 dB. That's a swing of up to 30 dB or more in volume. The average listener at home will have their TV adjusted to a comfortable 70 dB. So if your volume suddenly decreases by 30 dB, they're not going to be able to hear what's going on and they'll have to constantly be adjusting their volume. And also the fact that the equipment we're sending our live stream over might not even be able to handle that wide of a dynamic range without distorting. So the first major difference in requirements for our mixes between house and live stream is a different volume range. Or in the sound world, we say that the live stream mix requires less dynamic range. For a live stream, we want to reduce the difference in volume that occurs and keep a consistent level throughout. Another difference in what these two people hear is that the person in the room will not only hear what's coming from the sound system, but they'll also hear direct sound from instruments on stage. The most obvious example is if you have drums on stage. Even if they're behind a shield, the listener in the room will hear a lot of drum volume directly from the stage. The result of this is that the person mixing in the room doesn't need to raise the volume of the drums much to achieve a good balance. And maybe doesn't even add drums to the mix in the room at all. Whereas the listener at home doesn't hear anything from the stage. And so if you send them the house mix, the balance of your instruments is going to be off. Let's take a listen. This might be what a house mix sounds like. But now if we bring that into balance for the live stream, adding drums and bringing up more reverb, balancing things out for the listener who's not in the room. So the second requirement of our live stream mix is that it requires a different balance. That includes instruments, speaking mics, reverb and effects. All are going to require different volumes in the live stream mix than they do in the room. The third requirement is that a live stream mix requires additional content. If we go back to our two listeners, not only does this person in the room get direct sound from the stage, but they also hear what's going on around them. Things like people singing, laughing, clapping. So adding crowd mics becomes a big part of recreating the sound in the room for someone watching the live stream. Let's see how that changes our mix now as we add in some crowd mics. So what are the implications of those requirements? What conclusions can we draw? Different volume dynamics, different balance between instruments and additional content requirements. If you looked at that and say, wow, that looks like it requires an entirely different mix from what's happening in the room, you're right. That's the point I'm getting at. The differing requirements between your house and live stream mix really necessitates a completely separate second mix. I know there are some people who use an aux mix or a matrix output for their live stream. And I think that's at least a step in the right direction for making some improvements over sending just straight board feed from your house mix. But I think there are two reasons why an aux or matrix mix will never sound as good as a completely separate mix. One is the fact that we are often dealing with less than ideal room and sound system situations. And because of that, channel EQ is often used to compensate for room issues like feedback or resonance, which sounds okay in the room. But when that EQ setting is used for your live stream, it's probably not ideal. The second reason is creating one mix is hard enough. Trying to create two mixes with one operator pretty much means that one of them is going to be left on autopilot. And that again is less than ideal and not really setting yourself up for success. So now that we understand some of the requirements for a live stream mix and why that necessitates a separate second mix, let's make some practical applications. How do we meet these requirements for our live stream mix? I'm going to encourage you to start a roadmap for your live stream audio setup, realizing that your audio is just as, if not more important than your video quality. And that in order to get the best sound you can for your live stream, you may need to take some pretty big steps. At the end of the roadmap should be a completely isolated mix. And by completely isolated, I mean two things. One, your channels are split from your front of house and mixed using a second mixer. And two, the person mixing is in an isolated room from your meeting space where they can make accurate mix decisions. We make our mix decisions, things like volume balance and what content we add to the mix based on what we hear. And if the person mixing your live stream is in the room, hearing all the sound in the room, even with the best isolating headphones on, they're not going to be making accurate mix decisions. So as you build your roadmap, think about what next steps you can take to get there. Maybe it's adding an audio networking card to your house mixer so you can split the channels. I know space is always at a premium and finding a space to dedicate to mixing is probably actually one of the biggest hurdles a lot of churches will face. Thankfully with digital audio networks, you can use just about anywhere you can run a cat cable to. A nearby office that's not in use on Sunday morning might be a good solution. Now that we understand why we need to create an isolated mix, in the rest of this video series I'm going to be showing you specifically how you can create that second mix using a DAW, which is just a software mixer on a computer. We've been mixing in a DAW on a computer here at our church for about seven years now. And while using an actual physical second mixer is perfectly fine, I think mixing in a DAW is an economical solution that lends itself really well to the requirements of a live stream mix. And we'll talk about some of those things specifically in the next two videos. Finally, and hopefully the reason you stick around here on my channel for the rest of this series, is that I'll go out on a limb here and say a live stream mix is actually harder and requires more mixing proficiency than a mix in the room. Remember all those things we have in the room, louder volume, more ambient sound, direct sound off the stage, all of those help to mask deficiencies in a mix. Whereas a live stream will reveal any deficiencies in your mix. So in the next videos we're going to talk about how to set up an isolated live stream mix and then strategies for making it sound great. Until next time, bye.