How to Listen to PC and Console at the Same Time

For the longest time, I’d been switching my headphones from PC to my Xbox One. At times I’d join into an Xbox party, then exclaim that I couldn’t hear because I’d forgotten to swap outputs.

I recently fixed all of that by putting use to the Line In jack on my motherboard. Now I can listen to my Xbox One and my PC through the same pair of headphones.

This will come in handy in the event that Xbox party app acts up, in which case I can switch comms over to Discord without a hitch.

To accomplish this, I simply ran a 3.5mm male-male cable from the headphone output of my Turtle Beach EarForce DSS to my PC’s line in jack. The remaining setup takes place on the PC:

  1. Open Sound in Control Panel and select theĀ Recording tab, or right click on the speaker icon in the taskbar and select Recording devices
  2. Right click on Line In and select Properties
  3. Select theĀ Listen tab
  4. Check Listen to this device
  5. (Optional) Select which playback device to put to using the drop-down menu

Problem
What if I want to output Discord audio to stream? Wouldn’t they hear Xbox audio twice?

Solution
Clumsy solution: Mute the capture card from within OBS – requires downtime, may forget to do so
OR VB-Audio Virtual Cable (more details to come)