I have a steel series gamedac (og). I absolutely love the thing. I am switching to IEM's because my hyper x cloud 2's are falling apart. More importantly, I've been feeling annoyed with game sound for years now. Bro, I remember buying my first gaming headset, a turtle beach px21 and I could literally tell with extreme pin point precision where the enemies were across the entire map. It was CRAZY how precise it was. I feel like (I know) gamedevs have been ruining our game sound for years now. I think at first it was because back then most people didn't have headphones. They used TV sound, esp on console. E.g. 360 era where everyone used the one sided chat headphone that came with the xbox + tv sound. Headsets gave you an immense advantage. But since then they've just ruined sounds to a point where it just sucks. Now it's no longer headsets give an advantage. No, people with ultra high end audio gear have a huge advantage and the rest of us can't make out whatever the F is going on.

Anyway, apologies for that salty rant.

I decided I would try IEMs. Fully expected to hate it. Ended up loving it. But .. here is my issue right. I needed a mic and I also needed sidetone. So I figured my cheapest option would be to get a TRRS splitter (splitting to audio + mic). But then I couldn't find any fooken mics that just work through 3.5 TRS /TRRS. It's all USB and XLR gaming mics. So I got a 11 euro lavalier mic, and it works with the splitter. Even get sidetone. it sounds terrible, horrifically bad noise floor for side tone. Ruins the sound of my IEM. If I set sidetone lower (it only has 3 settings on the gamedac) then I can't hear myself and the hiss is still there.

I have been looking for a solution for days now. But everything I find / come up with is either prohibitively expensive or requires me to sacrifice sound quality / side tone.

So first solution. Buy a cheap XLR / USB mic and new DAC / AMP solution that supports XLR + sidetone ... Surely there must be one that is aff .. oh, yeah no. Even the crappy ones cost 150+ cheaper ones make huge sacrifices or have worse sound than my gamedac. Budget options are like 200+ euro. On top of that many aren't meant for low impedance IEMs. So this solution requires like 50 euro for a XLR mic like the fifine am8 and then on top of that anothe 200 / 300 euro for dac / amp.

Second solution, buy a better lav mic .. idk man. Should I just go with that? Depowerwise lav mics are supposed to be ok.. are 30 euro.. but at that price I might as well get a decent mic like the am8.

Third solution, buy the USB / XLR mic, use it as USB for now and plug your IEM into the 3.5 mic monitoring port of the mic. But that means I'm losing the incredible sound of my gamingdac. I mean, the difference between putting my mic into the PC/motherboard vs the dac is literally night and day. It's like listening to the same thing on cassette vs CD.

I know this was a whole book I just wrote. But please, someone help. I literally have a headache from trying to find a solution. At this point have started to look at Audeze Maxwell or the Steelseries nova pros to buy that over dealing with this sh. I just want ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sidetone and sound from my dac.



OH, before I forget. The last solution I've found, was to use sonar software in streaming mode. And when you do that you can get a type of sidetone. It hasn't got as much latency as the MS built in sidetone (which sucks) and on top of that it allows you to noise cancel and EQ your mic. So even the lav mic sounds decent .. except it still has latency. Not as bad as the MS one mic monitoring. But still enough that it will confuse me while talking to friends.