Mic monitoring — properly called sidetone — feeds a small amount of your own microphone signal back into your own earcups in real time, so you can hear yourself talk. It exists because a sealed headset blocks the sound of your own voice, and people who cannot hear themselves unconsciously get louder. Turn it on, set it low, and you will stop shouting at your friends.
This is not a gaming invention. Sidetone has been deliberately engineered into telephones for over a century, for exactly this reason: a handset that gave the caller silence in their own ear made them shout and made the call feel dead. Gaming headsets rediscovered the problem the moment they started sealing ears properly.
Why a sealed headset makes you shout
When you speak without headphones, you hear your own voice two ways: through the air, and through bone conduction in your skull. Your brain uses the combined level to regulate how hard you push. Put on a closed-back headset with decent isolation and you remove most of the airborne path, so the version of your voice you hear gets much quieter — and your brain compensates by raising your actual volume. This is the Lombard effect: people speak louder when they cannot hear themselves well, without noticing they are doing it.
That is why the symptom is so consistent: your teammates say you are shouting, your family asks why you are yelling at the computer, and you genuinely feel like you are speaking normally. The fix is not discipline, it is feeding the missing signal back.
It follows that the better the isolation, the more you need it. A well-sealing closed headset or an in-ear monitor needs sidetone far more than an open-back headphone does — one of the quiet advantages of open-back designs covered in our open-back vs closed-back guide. It also explains why active noise cancelling makes the problem worse, as our noise cancelling vs noise isolating guide gets into.
How to turn it on: it depends on your connection
There are two completely different answers, and knowing which applies to you saves a lot of searching.
USB or wireless headsets.The headset is a digital audio device with its own processing, so sidetone can be mixed inside the headset or its dongle with essentially no delay. This is where it belongs, and it is why vendor software exists: SteelSeries, Logitech G and HyperX each ship a desktop app — documented by SteelSeries, Logitech G and HyperX respectively — where the control usually lives under a name like sidetone, mic monitoring or mic volume in your ear. On a console the equivalent setting is in the system audio menu rather than an app.
Analogue 3.5mm headsets. A 3.5mm TRRS connection carries your mic to the PC and the PC's output back; the headset itself has no electronics to mix anything. So sidetone has to be created on the computer. In Windows, that is the per-device “listen to this device” option on your microphone in the sound control panel — Microsoft documents the sound settings where it lives. Be aware that this route adds the PC's audio processing delay, so it can be slightly echoey where a hardware implementation is not.
A third route, if you already run streaming software: create a monitor output in your audio mixer. That gives you the most control and is the most work. Our microphone setup guide covers the surrounding routing.
How loud to set it
Low. The goal is not to hear yourself clearly; it is to hear yourself just enough that your brain stops compensating. Set it to the quietest level at which you are aware of your own voice and then leave it there.
Too loud produces three problems. You become distracted by your own voice, which is genuinely unpleasant over a long session. You start under-projecting, which is the opposite failure and makes you hard to hear. And a loud sidetone on an analogue setup can feed back into the microphone, producing the howl our mic echo guide is about.
What mic monitoring does not do
This is where the term gets misused, so it is worth being precise. Sidetone is a monitoring feature. It changes nothing about what other people hear.
- It does not improve your mic quality.Your voice sounds the same to your team with it on or off. If they say you sound thin or distant, that is mic position or gain — see how to fix a quiet mic.
- It does not reduce background noise. It can help you noticeyour fan or your keyboard, which is useful, but the reduction itself is a separate job — how to reduce mic background noise is that page.
- It is not the same as hearing an echo of yourself in a call.That is almost always someone else's speakers being picked up by their microphone, or a stray “stereo mix” setting. Platform input and output settings — the ones Discord documents — are the first place to look.
- It will not fix a crackle or a dropout. Those are connection or driver faults; our headset crackling guide covers them.
Buying for it: which headsets give you the control
The practical rule from the section above is the buying rule too. A headset that connects digitally — USB, USB-C or a 2.4GHz dongle — can implement sidetone in hardware and expose it in its own software or on a base station, with no added delay. An analogue-only headset leaves you depending on Windows to do it, which works and is slightly worse.
So if hearing yourself matters to you, buy a digital connection. The four below are the digitally-connected headsets we recommend elsewhere on the site, in ascending order of what they give you: a wireless all-rounder with a USB-C dongle, a wireless headset with a serious detachable boom mic, a wired headset that offers USB-C, USB-A and 3.5mm so you can choose, and a flagship whose base station puts the controls on a physical dial. Check the current vendor app or manual for the exact control name on the model you buy — these move between software versions, and we are not going to claim a menu path we have not seen on your firmware.
The wider fields are on best wireless gaming headsets, best wired gaming headsets and best gaming headsets for mic quality, and USB vs 3.5mm is the guide that covers the connection choice in full.
