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I just purchased a SteelSeries Siberia V2 Arctic USB Headset, and the audio quality is fantastic for both input and output unless I'm playing a video game.

The sound quality will drop as if the bandwidth is being limited, causing a sort of hissing noise and lowered voice quality, which is especially hard on friends I'm communicating with on Skype or Mumble.

Previously I was using 3.5mm headsets through an external Sound Blaster audio card which fixed the issue for those headsets. Which means that it's probably not the game that is causing the problem.

Is there any way to reproduce this kind of fix or maybe solve the issue in general?

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  • Doesn't "the audio quality is fantastic for both input and output unless I'm playing a video game", pretty much say that the problem is the video games?
    – fixer1234
    Oct 7, 2014 at 18:28
  • @fixer1234 Sorry, I accepted an edit that maybe made my question less clear - it's an intermittent issue where I can be good for 10 minutes, then crummy for 5, then it resolves for a little while again. The sound isn't routing through the video games, and I was previously able to avoid the issue entirely with an external sound card, so I suspect a hardware or driver issue. Without the external sound card, but with a better headset, I'm trying to identify the issue - and I'm having trouble finding people with similar complaints or any suggestions.
    – Ace
    Oct 7, 2014 at 21:28
  • Intermittency is diagnostic. It means that the problem is related to a condition that changes. If the games use any external devices, explore whether the location of the device affects it. It could be heat related, kicking in while something is in a higher temperature range. It is not uncommon for signal linkage from the video circuitry to get picked up by the audio circuitry and it can be more pronounced for certain types of video content. Going to an external audio card may have stopped the signal pickup audible in your headphones but Skype still relies on the internal circuitry.
    – fixer1234
    Oct 7, 2014 at 21:57

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