My girlfriend has a lot of trouble with talking, and the rest of our polycule has a lot of trouble with hearing her. Me and My partner have autism, so bad audio actually hurts us, as our brains spend way too much energy trying to interpret noisy signals and give us headaches. So we really really don’t like My girlfriend’s speech problems.
Well yesterday her headmate was fiddling with the mic, struggling to be heard better. One of the downsides of living in someone else’s head is, you have to put up with their disabilities. So My girlfriend’s headmate was fiddling with the mic, and tried plugging it into the computer different. And wouldn’t you know it, her voice suddenly got WAY clearer, and listening to her stopped hurting!
Me and My girlfriend have the same model mic, and this is what the plug looks like:
As you can see, there’s a hole in the stand, right in front of the socket. Here’s that hole from another angle (It’s a slightly different version but the hole is pretty much the same):
My girlfriend spent the past two years with her mic plugged in, not through that hole, but jammed in from the side, with the cable bent against the stand. And THAT’S why it sounded like crap and caused us daily pain.
Check your audio cables, folks. Plug them in the right way. Learn how to run cables in a way that doesn’t hurt autistic folk.