A recent technical problem has resulted in troubleshooting and a new guide on headset audio bleed.
Recently, I purchased a new head set. The old one was falling apart after years of use. So, I did what I should in this situation and bought a new head set. While I was at the store, the sales clerk pointed out that modern headsets, for some reason have an issue of audio bleeding into dedicated microphones. This was a curious thing to hear, but I bought a headset anyway.
When I got home and tested it, it turns out, I was another person that experienced this audio bleed issue. My voice was being picked up elsewhere outside of my dedicated microphone. My optimism of finding a solution was low. My understanding was that the sales person I spoke to had a Razor headset. I, on the other hand, got a Coursair headset. Different brands, same problem. I was also told that other brands are affected by this as well.
So, I did some troubleshooting to figure out a solution. Unfortunately, the information sources I saw didn’t solve my problem. So, I did some further investigating (this wasn’t my first rodeo in troubleshooting these things). Surprisingly, I was able to solve the problem.
The issue isn’t that the headset was miraculously picking up my voice, but rather, whenever the headset is plugged in, it is picking up audio from every source. every microphone device plugged in became a live mic. It explains why muting the headset microphone was not working (both in playback and recording tabs). As it turns out, my webcam microphone was picking up my voice. As soon as that microphone got disabled, the problem went away immediately. I wrote a quick guide on this figuring that maybe this solution might help someone else out there having the same problem.
Yes, this doesn’t actually fix the audio bleed problem with the new headsets, but at least this is a solution that makes the problem become inaudible. I can’t promise it’ll solve everyone’s problem, but maybe some people might find this useful at least. Enjoy the new guide! Thoughts, ideas, and suggestions are, of course, welcome.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
