Dual PC setup issues with sound quality or latency

[Kaotic]

Hi

I recently bought a streaming PC in which I have installed a Elgato HD60 Pro, to upgrade my setup to be able to run a Dual PC setup while streaming.

I followed this hour long guide from "The Frugal Stream" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jtt76TDn6Qo&t=1743s)
to learn about Voicemeeter Potato and to follow his guide to setup my Dual PC sound setup.

Everything makes sense, and I've got it all setup and working, but when I loaded up Apex Legends, which is the game I stream. The sound quality was so weird and different from what I was used to, and it was in stereo. So I googled a bit and found out from Reddit posts and posts in here I think, that there are some issues with WDM and Logitech headsets or something. I have a Logitech G Pro Wireless headset that I use for gaming, and I use Logitech G Hub to control the surround sound and EQ in the headset. What I found out, please correct me if I am wrong, was that it is a software issues or something, so Voicemeeter or Windows can't send the sound I am used to have in my headset as a WDM input or something. Playing with stereo sound and no depth or bad sound quality just isn't optimal for me.

So after this I tried to google again for fixes for this, and I couldn't really find anything out there that told me how to fix it. The only thing I could find was people saying that you should try MME instead to get your "normal" sound. And this worked, suddenly the sound was the "normal" sound I was used to. But there was like half a second sound delay, which is huge in a shooting game/FPS like Apex, so I couldn't play with this without having stupid deaths or taking to much damage from incomming shots before beeing able to react to the sound input. I tried to google on how to fix this and someone said that changing the buffering samplerate of MME would help on this and I tried putting it down to the lowest which i think is 480 or something from 1024 and it helped a bit, but it was not enough for me to not feel it in-game playing Apex Legends and enough for it to not affect my performance playing.

Therefore I really really need help and guidance on what to do to get my Dual PC setup up and running the best way, since I've uses several days to try and figure this out and I even tried other guides or ways was of sending sound from one PC to another to stream. Basiclly right now I have uninstalled Voicemeeter Potato cause it was damned no matter what settings I was using and I can't even stream at all cause I changed my whole setup.

I don't understand how every streamer is using Voicemeeter Banana/Potato and every youtube video recommends using it for Dual PC setup, but I can barely find any posts or articles with people having the issue as me, and I guess a lot of people out there have Logitech headsets that they use for gaming.

Can anyone in here please help me to fix this or give me a solution?

I am very desperate and willing to do anything to get this to work

Kristian/Kaotic

[xcasxcursex]

Short answers:

If your headphones have two drivers, one on each side, then you should use stereo audio. Now is a good time to get that right. You won't need to fiddle with getting fake surround to work, that way. Positioning cues will be more defined, footsteps will be more audible, you will better judge the distance of sound cues (like reloads), etc etc.

WDM drivers will provide lower latency than MME. You can try to reduce buffer lengths later, when everything works otherwise perfectly but you would like to get that delay down. The defaults that come with Voicemeeter are great and correct and should always work for everyone, but for higher performance required of fast FPS games, you will need to put a little work in.

Try to use the same samplerate and bitrate everywhere. 24b/48k is the way to go for modern games (16/48 would be fine, 16/44k1 for older games... but PICK ONE AND STICK TO IT). This ensures no conversion is performed, and the audio passes through quickly and cleanly from game files to your ears.

Make sure your output devices aren't using 'shared mode'. Not only does it add significant delay for processing, but it also often fails to work at all. This is probably what happened with your virtual surround signal. We could configure voicemeeter to work with that virtual surround, but it's not a good idea. Not only is your in-game audio inferior, but it also means you now have game audio that is incompatible with the hardware of your stream viewers... And let's not forget, that the software processing of audio into virtual surround, is inherently laggy, and that lag will be unavoidable. I won't go into getting rid of shared mode too much as it has been covered here in the forums before, the TL;DR is get it working in exclusive mode.

HTH man happy fragging

[I3ordo]

Hello,
I was having exactly same problem, actually i cant even get proper (crackling free) audio even in MME, my advise is to Forget about elgato and their poor support staff i receive your audio from else where like from Monitor's headphone jack into line in of your audio card. You will have crackling free sound for sure.

If the sound coming from your line-in is terrible with interefrence , means you have a ground loop so buy an "ground loop isolator " and you will have much better hassle free audio