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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2830 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 17, 2023

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For those of you who play video games in the same room as someone else, how do you communicate with each other over the sound of the game itself? My wife and I like to play video games together, but we haven't figured out a good solution to the sound problem. Some obvious possibilities and their downsides:

  1. We both wear headphones. The problem with this is that we would have to lower our volumes so much to hear each other past the game sounds and the headphones' partial external sound dampening.
  2. We use microphones and join a voice chat together on Discord or something. The problem with this is that we can still hear each other's voices in the physical world, so then the microphones' delay causes a double perception which is quite confusing and jarring. And even if we had sufficiently soundproof headphones (which cost money we don't really have), microphone delays are just so goddamn annoying because of the unintentional interruption of someone who started speaking a second earlier than you (likewise on Zoom meetings).
  3. We use speakers. Obviously this is a problem because we're not necessarily in the same location in the game, so each of our game's sound would bleed into each other messily and confusingly.

I've never had this problem either. Maybe airpod style earphones that don't block external sound?

I've visited computer clubs to play games back in a day and somehow with 20-40 people sitting in a giant room all playing games I've never had the problem you describe.

Just lower volume, enable subtitles so not to miss out on dialog if you get distracted or add headphones that your partner can shout over if you're about to get dunked under t1 tower. What exactly are you playing that you have this......issue?

I imagine lowering the volume gets in the way of enjoying the sound design of the game, which isn't so important when you're playing your 1000th match of DotA or CS:S with the boys.

That is true, yet thinking about the games I played recently there were only few that I enjoyed/appreciated the sound design(they were mostly single player games, so full headphones and no distractions, or something like 2018 GoW with one person playing and other just along for the ride on a couch).

Looking back at this year with Remnant 2, Diablo 4, BG3 coop games - for me audio is not even top 20 reason why I played them...

Bone conduction headphones?

Wear one earbud each?

2 is the best option, you'll notice that everyone from amateur streamers to professional e-sports teams use it even when sitting right next to each other. The same is true for any team doing anything remotely high performance even if everyone is sitting in the same room- ie NASA mission control, military command centers, Formula 1 race teams, etc.

We use microphones and join a voice chat together on Discord or something. The problem with this is that we can still hear each other's voices in the physical world, so then the microphones' delay causes a double perception which is quite confusing and jarring.

You have a latency issue. The problem is not your microphones, or even likely your PCs, but Discord, which is notorious for (among many other things) terrible voice chat latency. Try Teamspeak or Mumble, which are specifically designed to be low-latency.

2 is the best option, you'll notice that everyone from amateur streamers to professional e-sports teams use it even when sitting right next to each other. The same is true for any team doing anything remotely high performance even if everyone is sitting in the same room- ie NASA mission control, military command centers, Formula 1 race teams, etc.

Alright, we've given this a try, but the problem seems to be that our voice is picked up on the other person's microphone, creating an echo. For example, if I talk, I can hear myself in my headphones because my voice reaches my wife's computer's microphone. I'm not sure how this can be avoided - obviously microphones aren't intelligent enough to know whose voice is being heard and selectively mute if it detects a voice other than the person using the computer associated with that microphone.

Is this perhaps solved by using microphones very close to the mouth (e.g., on a headset) and setting their input sensitivity to a level where the user's voice is picked up but another person in the same room is not?

Or do people in this sort of situation just tolerate hearing themselves through their own audio?

Thanks, we'll give it a try! The last time we did that was before my wife and I married and moved in together, so perhaps the latency on a LAN with a proper voice chat program will be negligible enough.

Yep, this is the right call for sure. Mumble is easy to set up and run locally, and there should be basically zero latency on a LAN.

Use on-ear headphones with open-cell foam padding. These do not dampen external sounds much. For example, the Koss CS100 is an inexpensive headset of this type. I use these for work because I can hear what other people on my team are saying even when I'm on a call, and because I can hear myself talking which prevents speaking too loudly without sidetone.

Edit: The JLab wireless retro headphones are also cheap and feature very little sound isolation, if you don't need microphones.

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