f13.net forums - Sound Card + USB Headset Problem: Help Needed.

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July 21, 2025, 04:52:24 PM

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Recently run into a bit of an interesting problem, thought I would throw it out here and see if anyone can help me, as I am totally at a loss here.

I use my PC as my TV/media center. Relevant info is as follows:

Soundcard - Creative Labs Audigy Platinum
Videocard - ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 9800 pro.

Here is my problem: I live in a basement appartment with a bunch of grumpy people on the floor above me who hate being woken up at 2 am by loud gaming noises. To keep them from beating me senseless, I game at night with a set of headphones. Recently my headphones died (ran over the cords with my chair one too many times) so I decided to get a new set of USB headphones. Thing is, for some extrememly odd reason, I simply can not get any sound out out of my USB headphones when trying to pull from the Auxiliary sound channel on the Audigy.

Sound goes something like this:
Combined Input (Audio/Video) on TV card - Passthrough cable to AUX port on Soundcard - Soundcard does whatever with the sound.

The thing is, I KNOW that the sound is coming through, cause the speakers directly connected to the sound card play it fine, but the USB headset simply doesent see that stream (Its almost as if the stream is not being seen by my PC and I cant figure out where to test to see if it IS being heard).

If anyone has any suggestions, or a similar setup that they actually have working, I would LOVE to hear them.

Wow, never heard of USB headphones.

My gut reaction is to say that headphones need to be directly connected to the sound card, but What do I kow?

Quote from: SurfD on March 22, 2005, 08:59:23 PM

The sound from your AIW card is going to be a problem. Do your new headphones plug into a little box with a standard stereo miniplug which then plugs into the USB port or is it all just one cable with a little box attached? The problem is that Windows sees the USB headphones as a separate audio device from the sound card. You can verify this by looking at the Sound and Audio Devices control panel. You should see two selections under the sound playback drop down menu, one for your sound card and one for your USB headphone (box). I don't believe there's a simple way to "mix" the sound from two separate audio devices so that you can get the sound from your AIW card which is being feed into the sound card to be heard on your headphones. Maybe one of our resident musicians knows of a way to do this. Just thinking off the top of my head, if your USB headphone box provides a mic input jack you might try pluging your AIW card audio out into that. Or you could try plugging the audio out from the AIW card into the mic input jack on the sound card (rather than the line in) and then futzing with the Sound Recording device in the Sound and Audio Devices control panel.

Some USB headphones are actually standalone headphones (i.e. their cable ends in a standard stereo minijack) that then plug into a special box which has the USB cable. If you have one of those you can simply plug the headphone into the sound card though you've sort of wasted some money since you aren't using that USB sound box anymore.

Quote from: Strazos on March 22, 2005, 09:06:27 PM

Wow, never heard of USB headphones.

USB headphones are nice in that the sound you get is crystal clear -- there's no line noise or static from other components in your system since the sound path leading out of the computer is entirely digital. My old Audigy card was very "noisy" in my system, especially when listening to DVDs so I used a Plantronics USB headset for a while which worked very well though I did lose all the fancy audio effects/3D audio that the Audigy was capable of. Later I upgraded to an Audigy 2 which has a much "cleaner" sound in my system so I went back to using regular headphones. USB heaphones are also popular with many laptop users since laptops often have very crappy built in audio.

Unfortunately, these headphones are Pure USB.

http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/products/details/CA/EN,CRID=103,CONTENTID=6337

Its not a jack to USB adaptor or anything like that.

I kind of figured this might be the problem, which is going to be a REAL pain in the ass then.

You might want to try an advanced mixer program. Something like this might work:

http://www.actualsolution.com/

If you look at this screenshot:

http://www.actualsolution.com/screen.htm

You can see it has two audio devices listed (a plug in card and the motherboard builti-in audio) so it might be able to do what you need.

Seems my problem was actually easier to solve then i expected.....

GOD DAMN I HATE WINDOWS..........X_X

It appears that the problem was actually drivers related.

Seems that whichever device driver was installed for detection of the sound stream through the ATI TV program misfired and wasnt properly connecting to the SoundBlaster drivers.

After checking some websites which indicated that my problem should not be occuring if windows sound is properly configured (IE, even though both devices are seperate, configuring the default Recording device to be the Audigy, and the default Playback device to be the Headset should have given me sound) I decided to remove BOTH sets of drivers, and re install from scratch, Soundcard first, then ATI drivers, then plug in the Headset.

Now everything works fine. Fucking Windows.......

Buy some real hedphones.