Can't Hear Voice Chat

Technical Support
1

About a week ago, I started having a problem with voice chat, where whenever someone started talking, my game would freeze for about half a second, and the sound would glitch out. After the one glitch, the chat worked fine, so I decided not to worry about it. The next day I experienced the same thing, and the following day, it glitched out so badly that my game froze twice when someone started speaking. The first time was in the lobby, for about five seconds, and the second time was in battle, for about ten seconds, which caused me to panic alt-tab out and back in, but it eventually stopped, only the game audio was a little quieter than before, but the game ran fine, so I ignored it.

Unfortunately, since that game, I have not been able to hear voice chat at all. I thought I might have muted it, but it’s on according to the options. I can see the little icons in the top left when people are speaking, but I can’t hear them at all. I can hear the rest of the game just fine, and have had no other problems with either Overwatch or any other game.

Before you assume I haven’t, yes, I have read the support page. Voice chat is enabled, my headset is on, I’m not using parental controls, my drivers are up to date, and I’m not even using a microphone for myself. I just can’t hear other people who are using voice chat.

Please help.

1 Like
2

voice server among other connection problems, doesn’t work for me either the past days. I am just gonna wait for dec 11, then reinstall OW if it doesn’t fix. I also was disconnected from Hearthstone today 2x. I guess blizzard servers aren’t working properly right now.

3

Well, I waited, and I tried reinstalling, but I still can’t hear voice chat, though again, the little speaker icons show up in the top left.

Now I have no idea what to do, and I’m probably missing calls people are making.

4

It’s possible your audio driver crashed when you were hearing the weird sound glitches. Are you using Windows Spatial sound? that’s been a problem recently. Also, have you tried disabling all other sound devices except the ones you want to use in Overwatch? It could be a conflict of Windows trying to use one device while Overwatch tries to use another. You might be able to spot the issue in the Windows Event Viewer under Windows System Logs (look for errors after opening Overwatch). I’d also recommend trying the voice chat in Battlenet to see if you can get that working, because if you can, it points to a different issue.

Finally, if nothing helps, can you post a dxdiag so we can see audio drivers and any crashes happening? Blizzard Support - Obtaining System Files

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Thank you for replying!

I’m not using Windows Spatial Sound. I even tried turning it on to see if it made a difference, and it didn’t.

It looked like I had only one sound device enabled already, but I tried enabling the other and disabling the first, then enabling them both, but still no voice.

Unfortunately, I don’t know anyone who uses voice chat on BattleNet personally. I can’t remember the people who I added subsequently who do use it, so I’m not sure that’s an option. I’ll see if I can try A.S.A.P. though.

I don’t know if this could be important, but before this started happening, I tried (unsucessfully) to get my microphone to work. My computer has only one audio jack, so I was fiddling around with some audio settings, as well as using all the different cables that came with my headphones. After nothing worked, I reset everything back to default, though. The problems didn’t start happening immediately afterward, so it could have been a coincidence, but if it’s important, I may as well mention it.

Here’s my DxDiag log, if it helps:

6

I don’t think Stereo Mix should be your default playback device.

7

Finally an update. I just got a chance to test voice chat in the BattleNet app, and I couldn’t hear anything there either. Again, I got the little icon appearing when the other person was speaking, but I couldn’t hear any sound.

Interestingly, I bought another game on a different service, and I’m not getting any sound for that game at all. I tried looking up information about this problem with that game, but there wasn’t any information about that either. One site recommended to reinstall DirectX to fix missing sound, which I tried, but that didn’t work. I suspect these problems are related.

Also, I followed your advice and switched the default capture device to “Microphone (Realtek High Definition Audio)” but it didn’t change anything.

Hopefully this information can help with further troubleshooting.

8

Do you have sound outside of games? YouTube vids and the like sound fine?

9

Would suggest reinstalling the audio drivers here. As this is a ASUS laptop, you may have Sonic Studio installed. This can cause issues with audio in a few of our games and so would recommend uninstalling it if you have it.

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Solved! Thank you so much!

The problem was Sonic Studio. I uninstalled it and restarted my computer and everything was fixed.

Kind of funny actually because after I noticed a problem with the sound of that game I’d just bought, I started trying to test all my games, and a good handful of the ones I tried were missing sound. Some of them would freeze or crash upon startup too, and uninstalling Sonic Studio also fixed that. I hope ASUS addresses this, since the application seems useful, but it seems to cause problems with a lot of games. In the mean time, there should be a PSA about this for a lot of games, since I’m sure I’m not the only one with this problem.

Thank you all for your time! I really appreciate it.

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