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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2617 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 17, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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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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