Your stream is quieter than everyone else's
Viewers turn you up, then get blasted by the next channel. Your meters looked fine the whole time, because they were measuring the wrong thing.
Your levels peak near the top. No clipping. It looks right.
You still sound quiet next to everyone else.
Peak and loudness are different questions
A peak meter shows the highest single sample. It tells you whether you are about to distort. That is all.
Loudness is how loud something feels over time. It is weighted for how hearing works. A voice with big peaks and quiet gaps can hit maximum and still feel soft.
The unit is LUFS. It averages across a whole programme. That is what a listener actually experiences.
Around -16 LUFS integrated for a stream, with a true peak limiter at -1 dBTP. Platforms differ and none of them normalise a live broadcast the way a music service does, so this is on you.
Why a limiter is not enough
People reach for a limiter, push the gain and call it done. That drives peaks into the ceiling. The quiet parts stay quiet.
Loudness comes from closing the gap between loud and quiet, then lifting the whole thing. That is compression. The limiter is the safety net after it.
A chain that works
- Noise gate first, set to open on speech and close on room noise. Do not set it so tight it clips word endings.
- Compressor at a gentle ratio, around 3:1. Set the threshold so normal speech triggers a few dB of reduction.
- Gain after the compressor to bring the level back up. This is where loudness is won.
- Limiter last at -1 dB, catching anything that gets past the compressor.
Order matters. A limiter before a compressor does nothing useful.
Measuring it rather than guessing
Record ten minutes of normal talking. Run it through a loudness meter. Read the integrated figure.
Too quiet means more gain after the compressor. Too loud means less. Then check the same clip for true peak and confirm the limiter is holding.
Do this once. The setting holds until you change microphone or room. It removes the most common reason a channel sounds amateur.
Sources
The Rig Wire reports on streaming technology from public documentation, source repositories and vendor releases. We did not bench-test what is described here. When we have tested something, we say so.