OBS Noise Suppression vs Noise Gate: Stop Them Fighting

OBS noise suppression and the OBS noise gate do two different jobs, and most setups have them quietly undoing each other. Suppression reduces steady background sound while you are talking. A gate mutes the channel entirely whenever you drop below a threshold. One cleans the signal; the other decides whether there is a signal at all. Both are built into OBS, which is free and open source, so nothing stops you from stacking them badly. Badly is the default, because everyone copies numbers off a two-year-old video and then wonders why the first syllable of every callout disappears.

What Each Filter Is Actually Doing

OBS noise suppression works on sound that is present while you speak. It models the steady stuff, the fan hum and the coil whine and the air conditioner, and pushes it under your voice. OBS ships it as a filter with several methods, including RNNoise and Speex. RNNoise is the heavier, hands-off choice; Speex gives you a suppression level to set yourself. Either way the channel stays open. Your mic keeps transmitting, it just transmits less room.

• Suppression reduces steady background sound continuously, including while you talk.
• A gate opens and closes the whole channel based on input level.
• Suppression has no threshold to trip. A gate is nothing but thresholds.
• Suppression will not kill your keyboard's loudest hits. A gate can, and it takes your quiet words with them.
• Run both and the gate now judges an already-quieted signal, so borrowed numbers stop meaning anything.

That last line is the entire problem compressed. Filter order changes what the gate hears. Put suppression first and your noise floor drops, so a threshold that used to sit safely above the room is suddenly sitting in the middle of your voice. Put the gate first and it judges the raw signal, which is usually what you want, because deciding whether you are talking at all is easier on untouched audio than on audio something else has already reshaped.

Why Your First Syllable Keeps Disappearing

A gate has an attack time: how fast it opens once you cross the threshold. Too slow and the front of every word is gone before the channel opens. Set the threshold too high and quiet consonants never cross it in the first place. Together those two produce the classic sound, where every sentence arrives as if it started somewhere else. You never hear it, because your ears get the version coming out of your own head. Your chat hears the edited one.

Hold and Release Do the Other Half

Release controls how fast the gate shuts. Snap it closed too quickly and the natural tail of your voice gets amputated, which lands as robotic. Hold keeps the gate open for a set time after you fall below the threshold, and it is what stops the gate chattering open and shut in the pauses between words. If your mic sounds like it is stuttering during ordinary speech, suspect hold before anything else. And if you tuned all four controls from someone else's screenshot, none of those values were ever about your mic, your gain, or the room you sit in.

Tune the Gate by Ear, Not by Screenshot

Borrowed numbers are someone else's gain staging. Do this instead, in ten minutes. Start with the gate off and get your input gain right: speak at the volume you use mid-fight, not your polite setup-video voice, and peak short of clipping. Then add the gate alone and raise the close threshold slowly until the room falls away when you stop talking. Stop the instant your normal voice starts getting clipped at the front, back it off a little, and leave it.

Add suppression after that, and place it after the gate in the chain. Our OBS noise suppression page walks the filter setup itself, and the OBS noise gate page covers where each control lives, so this article can stay on tuning. Then record two minutes of yourself doing what you normally do, typing and laughing and calling things out, and listen back on headphones. Every gate problem is obvious on playback and invisible while you are the one talking.

If you would rather not maintain a chain at all, a virtual mic sits upstream of everything. Krisp installs as one: you select Krisp Microphone as the input in OBS, and processing runs on-device on the CPU, which is the trade being made rather than a free lunch. Our Krisp for streamers page has the detail, the free stack list covers no-cost options, and Discord noise suppression is a separate layer for voice chat, not your broadcast. Paid Core is $8 a month billed annually or $16 month to month, verified August 2026.

Edge Cases and Common Traps

Stacking a Suppressor on Top of a Suppressor

If NVIDIA Broadcast or SteelSeries Sonar is already cleaning your mic upstream, adding OBS noise suppression on top usually makes things worse. Two models guessing at the same signal is where that swimming, underwater artifact comes from. Pick one processor and make the other a passthrough.

Looking for a Plugin That Does Not Exist

People search for an OBS noise suppression plugin expecting a download page. The filter is already there. Right-click your audio source, open Filters, add Noise Suppression, then choose the method. Nothing to install for the built-in ones.

One Chain per Source, Not per Scene

Filters attach to the audio source, not the scene. Add a second mic source for a second scene and it arrives with an empty filter chain and none of your tuning. That is why gates appear to stop working the moment you switch scenes mid-stream.

FAQ

What is the difference between OBS noise suppression and a noise gate?

Suppression reduces steady background sound continuously, including underneath your voice. A gate mutes the channel completely when the input falls below a threshold you set. Suppression changes how you sound; a gate changes whether you are heard at all. They solve different problems and a good chain usually needs both, tuned separately.

What are the best OBS noise gate settings?

There are none that transfer. Gate values depend on your mic, your gain, your distance from it and your room, so a number that works for a streamer with a shotgun mic in a treated closet will chop words off a headset user in a bedroom. Set your gain first, then raise the close threshold by ear.

Should the noise gate come before or after suppression?

Gate first is the safer default. It then judges the raw signal, the way it was designed to. Put suppression first and you lower the noise floor before the gate ever sees it, so your threshold ends up sitting inside your voice and quiet words get dropped. Either order works if you retune after changing it.

Is RNNoise or Speex better in OBS?

RNNoise is the heavier, hands-off method; Speex gives you a suppression level to dial in. Neither is universally better. Record the same thirty seconds through each, listen on headphones, and keep whichever leaves your voice sounding least processed. Both are free and both ship with OBS, so testing costs you nothing but a minute.

Do I need an OBS noise suppression plugin?

No. The suppression filter and the noise gate are built into OBS already, which is free and open source. Right-click the audio source, open Filters, and add them. Third-party plugins exist for other purposes, but nothing needs installing to get the standard suppression methods or a working gate.