What are the right noise gate settings in OBS?

You finish a sentence on stream, "and that's why the build works", and the recording plays back "and that's why the build wor". The fan hum between your sentences is gone, which is what you added the noise gate for. The ends of your words went with it.

That trade usually comes straight from the defaults. OBS ships the gate with a Close Threshold of -32 dB and an Open Threshold of -26 dB. If your voice is quiet, your mic is far away, or you speak with a soft finish, the tails of your words sit below -32 dB and the gate shuts on them. Nothing is broken. The numbers were never meant for your mic.

So the honest answer to "what are the right noise gate settings in OBS" is that there is no universal row of numbers. There are two measurements you take in about a minute, and the five settings follow from them. This page walks through the measurement, gives starting values for each control, and shows what to change when the gate starts eating words.

Two related pages may suit you better. If you want the whole filter chain (noise suppression, gate, compressor, limiter) and the order to stack them, read which OBS mic filters to use, and in what order. If your real problem is that the noise is loud while you talk, a gate will not help, because it only works in the pauses: start with how to stop your mic picking up background noise.

What the OBS noise gate actually does

A noise gate is an automatic mute switch with two trip lines. When your signal rises above one level, the switch opens and you are heard. When it falls below another, lower level, the switch closes and the output goes silent. The space between the two levels stops the gate from flickering when your voice hovers near a single line.

OBS gives you five controls. Here they are with the defaults, which are the same in the OBS Knowledge Base and in the filter's source code as of OBS 32.2.2:

Reading the filter's code shows four details that change how you should set it. None of them are on the settings screen.

1. It opens on a single peak. The gate compares every individual sample against the Open Threshold. One sharp sample above the line is enough. A mouse click or a key press is short, but its peak can be high, so it can open the gate even when it does not sound loud to you.
2. It closes on a level that drains at a fixed speed. For closing, OBS tracks a level that jumps up with every peak and then falls in a straight line. The speed of that fall comes from the gap between your two thresholds: OBS sets it so the level crosses from the open line to the close line in 1/75 of a second, about 13 ms. A loud syllable starts the fall from higher up, so the gate lingers longer after loud words, and more so when both thresholds sit low. After the soft end of a sentence the fall is short, and that is where Hold Time bridges the gap.
3. Hold starts after the gate closes. When the level drops below Close Threshold, the gate is marked closed, the hold timer starts, and the volume stays where it is until Hold Time runs out. Then the Release fade begins. If you speak again during the hold, the gate reopens with nothing lost.
4. Closed means silence. The OBS gate fades to zero. There is no "range" setting that lets it turn the noise down by 10 dB instead of muting it. That is why a gated stream can sound like the room switches on and off with your voice, and it is the main reason to consider the Expander instead (more on that below).

The slider range for both thresholds is -96 dB to 0 dB, and the three time fields accept 0 to 10 000 ms.

How to use the noise gate in OBS

Adding the filter takes four steps:

1. In the Audio Mixer, right-click your microphone (or open its menu) and choose Filters.
2. Click + under the audio filters list and pick Noise Gate.
3. Name it and confirm. The five controls appear on the right.
4. Put on headphones, open Edit > Advanced Audio Properties, and set Audio Monitoring for the mic to Monitor Only (mute output) while you tune. You now hear the mic the way OBS processes it, gate included. Switch it back to Monitor Off when you finish: as the name says, Monitor Only mutes the mic in your stream and recordings.

Two traps catch people here. First, the OBS volume meter shows the level after the filters and after the fader. If you read your levels with the gate already on, a closed gate shows an empty meter and tells you nothing about the noise. Second, the gate sees the signal after every filter above it in the list, but before the mixer fader. So for measuring, keep the fader at 0 dB and switch the gate off with the eye icon next to its name.

Measure first: the two numbers that set both thresholds

The OBS Knowledge Base puts the whole method in one line: close threshold above the noise, open threshold slightly below your voice. To do that you need to know where the noise and your voice actually sit. The meter has a peak dot that holds the loudest level for 20 seconds, which makes this easy.

Number one: the noise peak (call it N). Disable the gate. Sit where you normally sit, with the fan, the air conditioning and the PC running as they do on stream. Stay silent for 20 seconds. If you type or click while you talk, type and click during this test too. Read the peak dot.

Number two: your quietest speech (call it Q). Read a few sentences at normal volume, letting them trail off the way you naturally do. Watch where the meter sits on the soft ends of words, not on the loud middles. Speech is uneven: stressed syllables push the meter up toward the yellow zone, and the last sound of a sentence lets it fall well into the green. That low reading is Q.

Then:

Close Threshold = N + 4 dB
Open Threshold  = Close + 5 dB
Check:          Open must sit at least 3 dB below Q

Worked example (readings are illustrative, take your own):
N (silent room, fan on)       = -54 dB
Q (soft ends of sentences)    = -40 dB
Gap                           = 14 dB  → enough

Close Threshold = -50 dB
Open Threshold  = -45 dB  (5 dB under Q, passes)
Attack 5 ms, Hold 250 ms, Release 200 ms

The check is the step people skip. It needs a gap of roughly 12 dB between N and Q: 4 dB of headroom above the noise, 5 dB between the two thresholds, 3 dB below your soft speech. If your gap is smaller, no setting will work cleanly. Either the close line sits inside the noise, so the gate flutters open on the fan, or the open line sits on top of your speech, so it eats the starts and ends of words. That is a measurement problem, not a settings problem, and the next sections show how to widen the gap.

Good noise gate settings for OBS: starting values

With N and Q measured, here is where to start. The rows show three example readings, not typical values for any mic, because your room decides them.

Why those time values:

• Attack 5 to 10 ms instead of 25. The OBS attack is a straight fade from silence to full volume. At 25 ms, the first 25 ms of every word after a pause comes in faded, and the start of a word is often a consonant, the part that makes it intelligible. OBS's own Knowledge Base recommends 5 to 10 ms for the Expander's attack, and the same reasoning applies to the gate. Going down to 0 ms can produce a click as the gate snaps open, so 5 ms is a safe floor.
• Hold 200 to 300 ms. Hold is the gate's patience. Too short and it closes in the small gaps between words, so a sentence turns into a string of on-off chops. Too long and the noise trails your voice for a beat after every phrase. Start at 250 ms and shorten it only if you hear the room hanging on after you stop.
• Release 150 to 250 ms. A short release cuts the fading tail of your last word. A longer one lets the end of the word and the room fade together, which is less noticeable than the room vanishing in one step.

These are the best noise gate settings for OBS in the sense that they are the right place to start. They are not a preset to copy, because the thresholds belong to your room.

When the gate cuts your words

This table covers the complaint that sends most people searching. Change one thing at a time and listen through the monitor after each change.

The keyboard row deserves a closer look. Because the OBS gate opens on a single sample peak, it has no way to tell a click from a consonant. Distance does more here than any slider: in a room without much echo, halving the distance between your mouth and the mic raises your voice by roughly 6 dB while the keyboard stays where it was. Move a desk mic from 30 cm to 15 cm and you have bought about 6 dB of gap without touching a setting.

Noise gate or Expander?

OBS has a second filter for the same job, and in a noisy room it is often the better one. The Expander turns quiet sounds down by a ratio instead of muting them. OBS describes it as similar to a gate but with an adjustable ratio, and offers two presets: Expander (low ratio, light reduction) and Gate (high ratio, behaves much like the noise gate).

Two things make it gentler for speech:

• Ratio. The OBS Knowledge Base suggests 2:1 for light reduction, 10:1 for full reduction, and calls 4:1 a balance that reduces noise without fully gating it. At 4:1 the room drops a lot in your pauses but never disappears completely, so there is no on-off switch for the listener to notice.
• RMS detection. The Expander can measure an average over the last 10 ms instead of single peaks, which OBS says helps stop it opening on quick little peaks of noise. That is exactly the key-click problem the gate has.

The Knowledge Base recommends 5 to 10 ms attack and 50 to 120 ms release for the Expander, with RMS detection.

Which one to pick: choose the gate when your room is quiet and you want true silence between sentences, for example a voice-over or a recorded tutorial. The Expander at 4:1 suits live streams in an ordinary room, where the noise never fully stops and an audible switch is worse than a little residual hum. Set its threshold the same way as the Close Threshold above: a few dB above your measured noise.

Noise suppression first, then the gate

A gate cannot remove noise. It can only hide it in the pauses. Noise suppression works differently: it tries to take the noise out of the signal, including while you talk. On a Mac, OBS offers two methods in the Noise Suppression filter. RNNoise is the default; OBS describes it as higher quality at higher CPU cost. Speex is lighter and has an adjustable suppression level that defaults to -30 dB. The third method, NVIDIA Noise Removal, needs NVIDIA's Broadcast SDK, which as of October 2026 NVIDIA lists for Windows 10 64-bit with an RTX 2060 or newer, so it does not exist for Mac users.

The OBS Knowledge Base is frank about the limits: suppression handles PC fans and mild environmental noise well but is generally not effective against a lot of background noise, such as a loud room.

The useful combination is suppression above the gate in the filter list. Suppression lowers the noise floor, which widens your N to Q gap, which lets the gate thresholds sit lower, which means fewer cut words. The catch is that your measurements must be taken where the gate sits. Add suppression, keep it on, disable only the gate, and measure N and Q again. Numbers taken before suppression will be too high.

If you are comparing free options outside OBS as well, free noise cancelling software for your mic covers what works without paying.

Streamlabs OBS noise gate settings

Streamlabs Desktop uses the same Noise Gate filter with the same five fields: Open Threshold, Close Threshold, Attack Time, Hold Time, Release Time. Streamlabs' own guide shows the default open threshold of -26 dB and suggests a close threshold about 5 dB below the open one, which matches the 5 dB spacing above. It also recommends setting the mic's monitoring to Monitor Only while you tune, through the settings cog in the mixer.

So the best noise gate settings in Streamlabs come from the same two measurements. Streamlabs Desktop is available for macOS as well as Windows, and everything on this page about thresholds, hold, attack and the Expander applies unchanged.

What a gate cannot fix, and where TunedMic fits

After all this tuning, three limits remain, and they are worth knowing before you spend an evening on sliders.

The first is noise under your voice. A gate opens for your voice and lets everything else through with it. If the room is loud while you talk, viewers hear it while you talk.

The second is that OBS filters live only in OBS. Your stream hears the gated, suppressed voice. Your teammates on Discord, your guest on a Zoom call, the person you are talking to in Telegram while streaming, all hear the raw mic, because those apps take the microphone directly and never pass through OBS.

The third is that thresholds are tied to a room. Open the window, start the dishwasher, move the mic, and your N changes.

On a Mac with Apple silicon, TunedMic addresses the second and third points from a different angle. It adds a virtual microphone called TunedMic that takes your real mic, processes the sound on the Mac in real time, and hands the result to any app that picks it: OBS, Discord, Zoom, Telegram, browsers. You set it up with Sound Check, about a minute of reading aloud, during which it takes more than 30 measurements of your voice, your mic and your room. Its profiles are built from those measurements rather than stock presets, and the Creator family (Balanced, Broadcast, Crisp) is meant for streams, videos and podcasts. Switch profile and every app hears the change at once.

In OBS you select TunedMic as the device in your mic's audio input source. It adds less than a tenth of a second of delay. Because the noise is lowered before OBS sees it, the N you measure in OBS can come out lower. Measure again with TunedMic selected, then either keep a gentle gate or Expander with lower thresholds or skip it.

The limits, stated plainly: TunedMic needs a Mac with an M1 chip or newer and macOS 14 or later. There is no Windows version and no refunds, but 3 free days are enough to measure N again with TunedMic selected. It does not remove all noise and it cannot make a cheap mic sound like a specific expensive one. A loud room is still a loud room. If you stream from Windows, the gate and Expander above are your tools, and they are good ones.

Before deciding, listen to the before and after recordings on the home page, made with a MacBook's built-in mic, a cheap wired headset and a Hollyland Lark M2. Start with the Lark take next to a running Dyson hair dryer: in the processed version the dryer drops out between phrases. The launch price is $39 once, with a license for two Macs, with the details on the pricing page.

Your next step

Open OBS now and switch off every filter on your mic with the eye icon. Set the fader to 0 dB. Sit silent for 20 seconds with your usual noise running and write down the peak dot: that is N. Read three sentences and let them trail off, and write down where the soft ends land: that is Q. If the gap is 12 dB or more, add the gate with Close at N + 4, Open 5 dB higher, Attack 5 ms, Hold 250 ms, Release 200 ms, set monitoring back to Monitor Off, and record a test clip. If the gap is smaller, move the mic closer before you touch a single slider, then measure again.