AUDIO
YOUR FOH MIX SOUNDS GREAT. WHY DOES THE LIVESTREAM SOUND TERRIBLE? | Steve Sattler
Sunday morning is going well. The band sounds great, the vocals are clear, the congregation is singing, and the mix at front of house feels exactly the way you want it to feel. Then somebody pulls up the livestream on their phone.
The vocals are too loud. The drums sound small. The electric guitars have disappeared. The congregation sounds like they’ re worshiping in another building— or isn’ t there at all. Everything feels flat and strangely disconnected.
But it sounds great in the room. So, what happened?
Probably nothing. The problem is that the mix you created for the room and the mix you need for the livestream are doing two very different jobs.
The FOH engineer is mixing a PA system into a physical acoustic space. The online listener doesn’ t have that room. They have only what you send them. That difference is the starting point for understanding why simply sending the main left / right mix to your livestream rarely produces the result you expect.
The Room Is Part of Your FOH Mix When you’ re standing at front of house, you aren’ t hearing only the loudspeakers. You’ re hearing the PA combined with the acoustic sound coming from the stage and the room itself. The snare drum may already be 95 dB at FOH before you add much of it to the PA. Guitar amplifiers, acoustic drums, cymbals and the congregation all contribute energy that may require little or no reinforcement in the house mix.
That means your FOH mix isn’ t really the complete mix. It’ s the part of the mix the room needs from the PA.
The Livestream is different.
The person listening through headphones in their kitchen doesn’ t hear the acoustic snare drum. They don’ t hear the congregation behind them. They don’ t hear the stage volume or the
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