Hear Your Game Without Voicemeeter

Console or second PC, one capture card, one checkbox, buried four clicks deep

Who this is for

Your game is on one box and OBS is on another, with a capture card between them.

That's two setups, and they have the same problem:

• Dual PC streamers. Game on one PC, OBS on the other
• Console streamers. PlayStation, Xbox, or Switch into a capture card, OBS on your PC

If you're in either group you've probably already tried Voicemeeter Banana. Possibly VB-Cable as well. You may have a nice headset with its own DAC, a set of desktop speakers, and a growing sense that this should not be this hard.

It isn't. You've been solving the wrong problem.

Who this is not for

Single PC streamers with no capture card. Your audio problems are real but they're different ones. (Start with [the per source audio guide] instead.)

Read on anyway if you want the last section. The trick at the end works on every input device you own, on any setup, and it's the part most people find most useful.

Why the usual advice fails you

Search this problem and every answer points the same direction: install a virtual audio device. Route your game to one cable, your Discord to another, your music to a third, mix them in Voicemeeter, send the result somewhere.

That treats it as a routing problem. Audio is in the wrong place and must be moved.

It isn't a routing problem. Your game audio is already arriving at your streaming PC. It comes down the HDMI cable into the capture card alongside the video, because that's what capture cards do. It's already there. It has been the whole time.

You don't need to move it. You need to listen to it.

Every virtual cable you install is machinery built for a problem you don't have, and each one adds a place for latency, drift, and silence to hide.

This is doubly true on console, where the advice gets stranger still. Splitters, optical adapters, a second headset, a mixer under the desk. None of that is necessary. Your PS5 is already sending its audio down the same cable as its picture.

The setup

Console  ─┐
          ├─HDMI out──▶ capture card ──USB──▶ Streaming PC ──▶ your headphones
Game PC  ─┘                                        ▲
                                            one checkbox, here

Three things make this work, and only three:

1. Your console or game PC sends video and audio over HDMI to the capture card.
2. The capture card connects by USB to your streaming PC.
3. Your headphones listen to the streaming PC. Not the game PC. Not the controller.

That third point is the one people get wrong, and it is where both setups go wrong the same way.

Where the headphones plug in does not matter

This is the part that trips people up, and it is simpler than it looks.

Listen sends the audio to whatever your default playback device already is. That is it. Windows does not care where your headphones physically are. It hands the sound to your default output and your default output takes it from there.

So all of these work, and they work for the same reason:

• Straight into the streaming PC. Front jack, back jack, USB headset, whatever you have.
• Into your audio interface, if the interface is connected to the streaming PC.
• Into your microphone, if it has a headphone port. A Blue Yeti has one, and plenty of other mics do too.

In every case your headphones are hanging off the streaming PC's default output, so that is where the sound arrives. Nothing to configure, nothing to route.

If you already monitor through an interface or through your Yeti, keep doing that. You are not being asked to change your headphone setup. You are being asked which computer it is attached to.

The one arrangement that does not work

Headphones on the game side. In the game PC, or in the controller.

Do that and you will spend the rest of your life building bridges to carry sound back and forth between two machines, which is exactly the trap the virtual cable advice sends you into. Move them to the streaming side once and the problem stops existing.

Console players: yes, this means taking the headset out of the controller. That feels wrong for about a day, and then you'll notice you can finally hear your game, your Discord, your alerts, and your music in one place, at one volume, with one set of controls.

The checkbox

It's in Windows, not in OBS. That's why you couldn't find it. You were looking in the wrong program.

Do all of this on your streaming PC.

1Tap the Windows key and type sound

2Open Sound mixer options

It's usually the best match.

3At the top, click Sound in the breadcrumb

You'll see System › Sound › Volume mixer. Click Sound, the middle one.

This step is counterintuitive and it's the reason people give up. You're deliberately going backwards out of the page you just opened. It's necessary because there's no search term that lands you on the Sound page directly, nothing you type puts it in Best match. So you get there by opening its child and stepping up.

If you've searched for this before and concluded Windows had removed the setting, this is why. It's still there. It just has no front door.

4Scroll to the bottom and click More sound settings

Under Advanced, below "All sound devices" and "Volume mixer".

5The old Sound panel opens

This is the classic dialog, unchanged for about fifteen years. It opens on Playback.

6Click the Recording tab

7Find your capture card and double click it

Double click opens Properties directly.

Device names are unhelpful. If you can't tell which is your capture card, unplug it and watch which entry disappears.

8Second tab: Listen

Note the dropdown under the checkbox: Playback through this device. Leave it on Default Playback Device. That is what makes this work no matter where your headphones are plugged in, because the sound follows your default output wherever it goes.

You only touch that dropdown if you want this one device sent somewhere specific, say the capture card to your desk speakers while everything else stays in your headphones. Most people never need it.

9Tick Listen to this device then Apply

That's it. You're hearing your console or game PC in real time, at the lowest latency available, with nothing installed.

If you hear nothing, the first thing to check is which device Windows currently considers your default output. The sound went there.

What you just avoided

No Voicemeeter. No VB-Cable. No virtual cables, no mixer routing, no sample rate matching across four devices, no diagram taped to your monitor.

If you have Voicemeeter installed for this specific job, you can remove it. If you use it for something else, genuine per application mixing on a single PC, keep it. It just isn't doing this job for you, and it never was.

The part that's worth more than the fix

Everything above solves one setup. This next bit works on every input device you own.

You now have two completely independent audio paths:

They don't touch each other. And that's a lever.

Add the same capture card to OBS as a Video Capture Device and leave monitoring off. Now Windows handles what reaches your ears and OBS handles what reaches your stream. Change one, the other doesn't move.

That means you can:

• Hear a device chat can't hear
• Send a device to chat that you can't hear
• Set your own monitoring level without touching what goes out
• Stop guessing whether a slider is "your volume" or "their volume", different systems, different sliders, no overlap

And it isn't just capture cards. It's every input device Windows can see:

An iPad plugged into your streaming PC becomes an audio source you can hear and route. So does your phone. So does a second console, a mixer, a synth, or a friend's laptop on the desk.

Once you see that Windows monitoring and OBS output are two separate systems, a whole category of audio problems stops being confusing, and a whole category of expensive hardware stops being necessary.

Most people never find this because it's four clicks deep behind a page with no front door.

Test any microphone in ten seconds

Same tab, different device. Find your microphone in the Recording list, open Properties, Listen, tick Listen to this device.

You'll hear yourself instantly.

That's not a party trick, it's the fastest mic test that exists. Hear yourself and you know the mic works, Windows sees it, and the device is live, before you've opened another program. Can't hear yourself and you've learned something useful just as fast.

Untick it afterward unless you enjoy hearing yourself breathe.

The principle underneath

The reason this took you weeks and the reason it takes one checkbox are the same reason.

Once you stop moving sound around and start selecting it where it lands, most stream audio problems collapse into something small. That principle is what the rest of these guides are built on.

Next: [Record Discord without your voice in it] the same idea, applied to tracks.