What Chat Hears

Fix the audio for notifications, Discord, and echoes in OBS.

The question

Point at any sound your computer can make and answer this: who hears it?

You. Chat. Both. Neither.

If you cannot answer that instantly for every source in your mixer, you do not have an audio problem. You have a model problem, and every setting you change after that is a guess.

Who this is for

Anyone whose stream has echoed. Anyone whose chat has heard a Discord notification. Anyone who cannot hear their own alerts.

And anyone who has ever turned the game up so chat could hear it better. That last one is the tell.

What is actually wrong

Almost everyone sets Desktop Audio as an output in OBS, so chat hears everything the streamer hears.

It is the first thing most setup guides tell you to do, and it costs you privacy, notifications, phone calls, Discord blips going out live, and audio arriving at the same place twice.

Desktop Audio is a firehose. It captures everything your computer plays, indiscriminately, including things you would never choose to broadcast.

This guide turns it off and shows you what to do instead. The first screenshot is the Audio tab with every Global Audio Device disabled. It looks broken. It is correct, and it is the whole argument.

What is inside

The two paths, and why every confusing audio problem comes from treating them as one. Monitoring is what you hear. Output is what chat hears. A source can be on either, both, or neither.

Why the Monitoring Device setting should be left alone, and why the people fiddling with it are fixing a symptom.

The two monitoring modes. Not three. Every other guide on this subject still documents Monitor Off, Monitor Only, and Monitor and Output. Current OBS has two, and the screenshot is in the guide. If you have been hunting for a third option, it is not hidden, it is gone.

The browser source trap. There is a checkbox that decides whether you can hear your own alerts. Leave it unticked, which is the default, and chat hears them while you do not. Nothing warns you.

Why you must never monitor your own microphone, and what happens to the way you talk when you do.

The echo, explained properly. Not "check your settings", but the actual loop: sound goes to chat, you monitor it, what you hear goes to chat, comes back, goes out again, and builds forever.

The level ladder. Voice at -6 dB, alerts and games at -18 dB, music at -24 dB, and the ordering rule that says which one to set first. It is not the one you would guess.

Record, test, check. The loop that separates a stream that sounds professional from one that does not, written out as steps, with what to listen for on each pass.

Windows Listen versus OBS monitoring, where the line between them is, and why turning on both for the same device gives you phase.

The two second rule. Why anything you play reaches chat about two seconds after it reaches you, and how to use that deliberately instead of fighting it.

A one page reference table at the end. Every source type, its monitoring setting, its level, and who hears it.

What you need

Windows and OBS Studio. Nothing to install, nothing to buy, no plugins.

13 pages, 9 screenshots. PDF, instant download, yours to keep.

Start free

The same thinking applied to a narrower problem is in Hear Your Game Without Voicemeeter, which is free and takes about four minutes. If that one lands, this is the guide it was preparing you for.