High Fidelity and Stereo Audio

For scenarios like live music, karaoke, podcasts, or professional streaming, you may want to deliver audio that sounds natural and unprocessed. Our SDK provides APIs that let you tune the audio pipeline for higher fidelity. External high-quality microphones are also supported.

HiFi Mode

The fastest way to enable high-quality audio is by turning on HiFi mode. This is an all-in-one switch that does three things under the hood:

Enables stereo capture – your app will record and transmit two channels instead of mono.
Studio quality bitrate – switches to a high-quality music bitrate.
Disables audio processing – echo cancellation, noise suppression, and automatic gain control are turned off.

Allow HiFi audio on the call type

HiFi audio is allowed by default on the livestream call type.

You can enable it on other call types by toggling the Allow HiFi audio setting in the call type settings. This setting is available in the Stream Dashboard, under Video & Audio > Call Types > [call type] > Settings > Allow HiFi audio

Microphone Hi-Fi mode

import { useCallStateHooks, SfuModels } from "@stream-io/video-react-sdk";

const { useMicrophoneState } = useCallStateHooks();
const { microphone } = useMicrophoneState();

await microphone.setAudioBitrateProfile(
  SfuModels.AudioBitrateProfile.MUSIC_HIGH_QUALITY,
);

Learn more

By default, screen share audio will be published in hi-fi mode and stereo. To override that behavior, please check the following example.

Fine-grained call controls

In the following example, we are going to build a Call Controls button that allows you to toggle between HiFi and standard audio at any time during the call:

import { useCallback } from "react";
import { useCallStateHooks, SfuModels } from "@stream-io/video-react-sdk";

export const ToggleHiFiButton = () => {
  const { useMicrophoneState, useCallSettings } = useCallStateHooks();

  // checks if the call type settings allow HiFi audio to be enabled
  const settings = useCallSettings();
  const allowHiFi = settings?.audio.hifi_audio_enabled ?? false;

  // checks if the microphone is in HiFi mode
  const { microphone, audioBitrateProfile } = useMicrophoneState();
  const isPublishingInHighQuality =
    audioBitrateProfile === SfuModels.AudioBitrateProfile.MUSIC_HIGH_QUALITY;

  // handles the togglling between hi-fi stereo and standard mono audio
  const toggleHiFi = useCallback(async () => {
    try {
      await microphone.setAudioBitrateProfile(
        isPublishingInHighQuality
          ? SfuModels.AudioBitrateProfile.VOICE_STANDARD_UNSPECIFIED
          : SfuModels.AudioBitrateProfile.MUSIC_HIGH_QUALITY,
      );
    } catch (error) {
      console.error("Failed to toggle Hi-Fi audio:", error);
    }
  }, [isPublishingInHighQuality, microphone]);

  // the call type doesn't allow HiFi audio, so we don't render the button
  if (!allowHiFi) return null;

  return (
    <button onClick={toggleHiFi} disabled={!allowHiFi}>
      {isHiFi ? "Disable HiFi" : "Enable HiFi"}
    </button>
  );
};

Low Bandwidth

Reject call when busy