Hiya all and sorry for the somewhat vague title, but… oh well.. here goes:

Received my Kraken V3 (USB, wired) yesterday and while everything seemed to run fine, I ran into some odd behavior when using discord while playing games. I would loose discord’s notification sounds (like PTT-key pressed, user enters/exits my channel, etc) - and weirdly enough this was an intermittent issue. Usually everything works as it should when I join a server/channel but as soon as I open the game I want to use discord in, the faulty behavior will start. I should probably also add that I did get occasional audio disturbances… like static sounding noises coming through the speakers, regardless of if someone was talking on channel or not. Those static noises aside, listening and talking to other users on the channel was never affected - I could hear them fine and they said I sounded normal.

I can’t be 100% certain because I didn’t get a chance to test this for a longer amount of time, but I am pretty sure that these odd occurrences only happen when I run a game together with discord. It thus far has never happened with just discord active and I did try three different games and always got the same result.

I’m on Windows 11, BTW and I’m running an adequately powerful and “healthy” rig (i7-14700KF, 32GB RAM), so I don’t think my hardware is at its limits here.. :)

I went through the usual steps to remedy this, but nothing seems to cure it without suffering some drawbacks. Updated the firmware, tried the HS on different USB sockets (it is now plugged into one of the mainboard’s sockets), etc, increased discord’s CPU priority in task manager, ran all apps I need to have open at the same time in either Admin-mode or non-Admin-mode, etc. 

I did come up with a “kinda”-solution, namely to disable the THX-spatial audio effect in Windows Sound settings. That however disabled all control Synapse had over the sound, so no switching between Stereo and Spatial in there and the EQ and its presets and all the enhancements also stopped working. It also made the HS go mute when I tried to re-activate the effect in Windows settings. It would still work with the effect disabled, but switching back to “THX spatial” would kill all audio. Getting that functionality back involved uninstalling the Kraken through Windows device manager, unplugging the set, re-booting the PC and re-plugging the set. So it’s not something I want to have to do on a regular basis.. :)

I’m pretty sure this is down to the headset, or rather more down to the fact that it’s a USB-headset - I’ve only ever used more old school HS’ before with a regular 3.5mm jacks and this is the first USB-set I’ve ever owned. So I’m at a bit of a loss here.

The one thing I did also notice while playing around with the settings and looking for a cure was that when I skipped through a video on YT (mostly notable in music videos), the tone of the audio would be off for about half a second after the skip before it started to sound again as expected. The volume would be lower and I think the EQ settings weren’t applied - as if the “audio-filter” had been bypassed due to the skip and then took a while to come back on (kinda hard to describe this behavior). Also of note is that when I had disabled THX Spatial in Windows settings, this change in audio-volume/-quality did not happen. Plus it also didn’t happen when I was trying to replicate it listening to and skipping through MP3-files via VLC media player… weird.

Thanks for your input!

Sascha