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Example deliverableThis is an illustrative example of what a Setup Review delivers, written for an imagined church. It is not a client engagement.
A worked example of a $149 Setup Review — the symptom a customer describes, what we check in 45 minutes, what we find, and the written recommendation a customer would receive.
The room sounds fine on Sunday morning — the band has good energy and the vocals are clear in the seats. But everyone watching from home says the music sounds thin and flat, and the words land about half a second after the speaker’s lips move.
The left-right feed is a mix made for the room, which the stream is not in
In a 150-seat room with a band, the drums, bass, and guitar amps carry on their own, so front-of-house keeps them low in the PA and lets the room fill in the rest — the congregation singing does the same. Two ambience microphones hung over the seats are patched into the console, but they are routed nowhere — not into the room mix, not into the stream. None of that reaches a stream fed straight from the main left-right mix: it hears the vocals, which depend almost entirely on the PA, and little else, which is why the stream reads as thin and vocal-heavy instead of full.
Audio and video are arriving over two different paths
Audio for the stream takes a different path to the encoder than the video does — often through a separate computer or app with its own processing buffer — and that path adds a fixed amount of delay to the sound. The picture arrives first and the audio trails behind by a constant offset, which is why the words land after the lips move instead of drifting further out of sync over time.
The encoder is compressing audio that has already been compressed
On top of whatever compression the console’s bus is already applying, the encoder runs its own compressor on the incoming signal, flattening the mix a second time and squashing out whatever dynamics made it through the board.
Fix first
On the console’s spare mix bus confirmed during the session, build a dedicated stream feed: bring the band up to balance against the vocals the way a mix for headphones needs, and send the two ambience microphones over the seats to that stream bus only — never to the room mix, where room mics this close to the PA invite feedback — so the stream hears the room the congregation is in, not just the platform. Feed the encoder from that bus instead of the room mix. This costs nothing beyond the time it takes — one afternoon with the console manual.
Fix next
Once Fix first moves the encoder’s audio onto the console’s stream bus, the separate computer or app leaves the audio path, which usually removes most of the offset, so measure what is left before delaying the picture. Measure the actual offset with a clap test, then delay the picture to match it — many streaming apps and some encoders have a video delay setting, or a negative audio sync offset where that option exists; the picture is what needs to move, since the audio is the one running late. Once the stream bus from Fix first is feeding the encoder, put a compressor and limiter on that bus directly and turn off the encoder’s own compressor, so the signal is only compressed once, where it’s actually being mixed.
Don’t buy yet
No new microphones, interface, or encoder — not until the two changes above are in place and a service has been recorded and reviewed. Most of what this stream is missing is routing, not equipment.
What this review does not cover
Have a quote you want checked first? →
Not a church? The review works the same for a studio, office, or stream room →