OBS Audio Monitoring Not Working - Fix

Your Audio Mixer meters are bouncing green. Your headphones are completely silent.

Nothing is broken. Monitoring in OBS is off by default, and it is off by design.

This trips up almost everyone who comes to OBS from a normal screen recorder, because in a normal screen recorder there is no such thing as monitoring. There is just sound. OBS behaves like a mixing desk instead: recording a source and playing that source back to your own ears are two different jobs, on two different paths, with two separate switches. Both switches start in the off position.

Here is what monitoring actually is, the two settings that turn it on, and the traps that keep it silent even after you have found them.

First, ten seconds of triage

These are two completely different problems and they get confused constantly:

Do the check before you change a single setting: record fifteen seconds, stop, and open the file. If the audio is in the file, your capture chain is healthy and you only need to fix playback to your own ears. That is what the rest of this page is about.

What monitoring actually is

When OBS takes in a microphone, it sends that audio down the output bus: into your recording file, into your stream, or both. That path is the one that matters to your audience, and it works whether or not you can hear anything.

Monitoring is a second, optional path that copies the audio back out to a playback device so you can hear what OBS is hearing. It exists so you can check your levels, hear a noise-suppression filter working, or catch yourself clipping before you have recorded forty minutes of distorted audio.

Because it is a separate path, it has its own configuration, and it needs two things set:

1. A monitoring device (global): where the copy gets sent. Settings, Audio, Advanced.
2. A monitoring mode (per source): whether this particular source sends a copy at all. Advanced Audio Properties.

Out of the box, the device is Default and every source is set to Monitor Off. That combination produces exactly the symptom you are seeing. Most people who land here are not fixing a bug. They are switching monitoring on for the first time.

Fix 1: Set the monitoring device explicitly

Never leave the monitoring device on Default. Default tells OBS to follow whatever the operating system currently considers the primary playback device, and the operating system changes its mind more often than you think.

1. Open Settings (bottom right of the OBS window).
2. Click the Audio tab.
3. Scroll to the bottom, to the section headed Advanced.
4. Set Monitoring Device to your headphones by name. Not Default. The actual entry, for example Headphones (Realtek Audio) or Scarlett Solo USB.
5. Click Apply, then OK.

The reason this alone fixes it for a lot of people: many USB microphones have a headphone jack built into the mic itself, and Windows exposes that jack as its own playback device. If your OS default flipped to the mic's jack while your actual headphones are plugged into the front of the tower, OBS has been faithfully sending your monitor feed to a jack with nothing in it. Same story with Bluetooth earbuds, HDMI monitors that announce themselves as speakers, and docking stations.

Pick the device by name and the guessing stops.

Fix 2: Turn monitoring on for the source

This is the one people miss, because it is not in Settings. It lives in the mixer.

1. In the Audio Mixer dock, click the three dots next to any source and choose Advanced Audio Properties. (It opens one panel listing every audio source, so it does not matter which source you click.)
2. Find your source's row and look at the Audio Monitoring column.
3. Change it from Monitor Off.

There are three modes and the difference between them is worth understanding properly, because two of them will cause you new problems if you pick the wrong one:

Read that table twice. Monitor Off does not mute anything. The source is still fully recorded. And Monitor Only mutes the source from your audience while letting you hear it, which is the correct choice for checking a mic privately and a catastrophic choice if you forget to change it back before recording.

For hearing your own microphone while you record, Monitor and Output is what you want. Unless you are about to hit the trap below.

The trap: do not monitor Desktop Audio

If you set Desktop Audio to Monitor and Output, you will create an echo, and on speakers you can create a feedback loop that builds into a squeal.

The logic is simple once you see it. Desktop Audio is the sound your computer is already playing. You can already hear it, out of the same headphones. If you now ask OBS to monitor it, OBS plays a second copy of that same sound back to the same device. You hear everything twice, very slightly offset.

It gets worse on Windows. Desktop Audio is captured with loopback, meaning OBS records everything being played on your playback device. OBS's own monitor feed is something being played on your playback device. So the monitor copy gets captured, and re-monitored, and captured again.

Leave Desktop Audio on Monitor Off. It is recorded perfectly well that way. Monitoring is for your microphone.

If you have already done this and your recording now has a doubled voice, that exact mechanism is covered in how to fix audio echo in OBS recording.

Fix 3: Clear Windows exclusive mode

If monitoring works until you launch a game, a DAW, or a call app, and then cuts out, another application has taken exclusive control of your sound device and locked OBS out of it.

1. Press Windows + R, type mmsys.cpl, press Enter.
2. On the Playback tab, right-click your headphones, choose Properties.
3. Open the Advanced tab.
4. Untick Allow applications to take exclusive control of this device and Give exclusive mode applications priority.
5. Apply, OK, then restart OBS.

Do the same on the Recording tab for your microphone while you are in there. Exclusive mode causes the same class of problem on the input side.

Fix 4: Restart OBS after any device change

OBS binds to audio devices when it starts and when a source is created. It does not re-scan the world continuously.

If you plugged in your headset, switched to AirPods, or connected a dock after OBS was already open, the monitoring device you selected may now point at a handle that no longer exists. The dropdown will still show the right name, which is what makes this so confusing.

Quit OBS completely and reopen it. If the monitoring device dropdown is missing devices entirely, that is the same problem from the other direction: the devices were not present when OBS started.

Fix 5: Bluetooth is not a monitoring device

You can select Bluetooth headphones as your monitoring device, and it will technically work, but you should not.

Bluetooth adds somewhere between 100 and 300 milliseconds of latency. Monitoring your own voice at a 200ms delay is genuinely disorienting, to the point where most people cannot speak fluently through it. It is the same effect used in delayed auditory feedback experiments, and it is not a fault you can tune out.

There is a second problem. When a Bluetooth headset opens its microphone, it drops from the high-quality stereo profile to the headset profile, and your monitoring audio turns thin and crackly. You have not broken anything. That is Bluetooth working as specified.

Use wired headphones for monitoring. If your microphone runs through an audio interface, use the interface's own direct monitoring knob instead, which routes the mic to your headphones in hardware at effectively zero latency and bypasses OBS entirely.

Fix 6: macOS specifics

On macOS, an empty or near-empty monitoring device list usually means a permissions or restart issue rather than a settings one.

• Check System Settings, Privacy & Security, Microphone, and make sure OBS is enabled. Then fully quit and relaunch OBS. A permission granted to a running process does not take effect until it restarts.
• macOS does not expose a system audio loopback to applications, which is why your Desktop Audio device is greyed out in the first place. That is a capture problem, not a monitoring problem, and it has its own guide: how to record system audio in OBS on Mac.

Do you actually need monitoring?

Worth asking before you spend another hour on it.

You need it if: you are tuning a noise-suppression or compressor filter and need to hear the result, you are checking for clipping or plosives, or you are live and need to know instantly if your mic dies.

You do not need it if: you are recording a tutorial, you can already hear your desktop audio through your own speakers, and you are going to review the file afterwards anyway. Monitoring is a live-production tool. If you are recording, the file is the source of truth, and a fifteen-second test recording tells you more than a monitor feed ever will.

Plenty of people arrive here trying to fix "broken" monitoring for a workflow that never required it.

Or skip the mixing desk entirely

OBS gives you a monitor bus, three monitoring modes, and a separate device selector because it was built for live broadcast, where an engineer genuinely needs to hear one source privately while another goes to air. If you are recording software walkthroughs, that machinery is a tax you pay for capability you never use.

Cubix Capture has no monitoring bus, because it does not need one. It picks up your microphone and your system audio together, keeps them in sync, and lets you check the result by watching the take back. It also frames the zooms for you from your cursor movement, so the recording is finished when you stop recording.

Keep reading: OBS can't hear desktop audio · how to fix audio echo in OBS recording · OBS microphone not working · OBS audio delay and sync issues