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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2593 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.

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.

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