Telepocalypse

Headset troubleshooting

You only need to read this article if you have a USB headset for your PC which has an inline volume control on the cord. Otherwise, shoo. Be off!

I thought I'd share this technical problem. As I mentioned before I use a Plantronics DSP-400 headset for Skyping, but posh ordinary headphones for music. The default playback device in Windows is the normal PC speaker output, because some applications will only use the default Windows device and don't give you an option to choose anything else.

Problem is this. The volume control on the cord doesn't work. I spent ages trawling the forums and Plantronics support pages to find the answer. So here it is.

The volume control will only control the default Windows device, and doesn't stick to controlling just the headset. Despite being in the cord of the headset as a digital substutute for an old-fashioned analogue potentiometer. No, there is no software update that fixes it. No, the "Let Skype adjust my sound device settings" tick box doesn't over-ride this. No, Plantronics doesn't think it's a bug -- their customer support believes it is a feature:

This is not a bug, the inline volume control for the headset is designed to adjust the master volume for the current default playback device. Under most installations the inline volume control is only used when the headset is set as the default playback device. I do understand what you would like to do with the inline control but presently there is no work around for installations such as yours using multiple playback devices.

So there you have it. Apparently if you have a USB headset you're supposed to play everything through that.

The customer is always wrong.