The Funkiest of Issues w/ Modmic Wireless

[CanOfRaccoons]

Since January or so, I've been running the Antlion Audio Modmic Wireless, and for the most part, it's gone without a hitch. Great audio, wish I used my head before I bought open-back headphones though.
Except for one very big and extremely elusive issue.
Occasionally, something fucks up. I have almost no idea what, except what Event Viewer spews out, which is pretty much only "Audit Success" with "Special Logon" and "Logon" spam. I haven't been able to track down anything besides that, save for when something big crashes. Oddly enough, it's able to be recreated when the mic is on, in the back IO port, while I'm connected on TeamSpeak3, and I finish a match in War Thunder. Obscure and specific, yes, but repeatable.
The only thing that I can think of causing this eccentric issue would be the motherboard, an Asus TUF-B550 Plus, since the "Armory Crate" and borderline-bloatware stuff has been a nuisance, and the RGB control has completely fucked up.
As for what I've done to troubleshoot, I've done the obvious "sfc /scannow", uninstalled all old GPU drivers with whatever that software is, updated the BIOS, even ran a 4-hour RAM test, with 0 failures. Pretty much everything short of a complete Windows reinstall, since I REALLY don't want to have to do that.
Also, I don't think it's just linked to the rear ports obv, I've tried a separate PCI-e USB expansion, and an external USB hub. Neither works, and it's worse on the USB hub. I ain't moving it to the front port, since my PC is about shoulder-height, and the 2.5" of the receiver sticks out more than enough for my shoulder to knock it out and fuck it up.
Any help would be appreciated, as I would like to find a fix that doesn't involve replacing or RMA'ing the motherboard, since I don't really want to touch this PC's innards until AM5 and such releases.

Edit; The only events I can find without digging deeply into Event Viewer are 4672 and 4624. If there's any special settings y'all think would help Event Viewer, let me know.

[KnightSirius]

Reviving this thread as it's a rare case that might be related to an issue I'm having as well.

Unfortunately you didn't mention what exactly the issue you were having was and went straight into the problem solving you attempted.

You mention

On 8/21/2022 at 9:47 PM, CanOfRaccoons said:

Occasionally, something fucks up. 
...
save for when something big crashes. Oddly enough, it's able to be recreated when the mic is on, in the back IO port, while I'm connected on TeamSpeak3, and I finish a match in War Thunder. Obscure and specific, yes, but repeatable.
 

So I'm assuming you get some sort of software crash or error while using the microphone (Teamspeak or otherwise).

If you're still having this issue I'd appreciate if you tested something for me as I think we may have a related bug.
Specifically, I'm on an ASUS X670E (AM5) board and you're on an ASUS B550 (AM4) board. I've also found one other person who has this issue with a Gigabyte X570 board (AM4).

My scenario is the following:
 

Have the ModMic Wireless dongle plugged into the PC and the mic on and connected (though the latter part doesn't seem to matter).

Then I use Dolphin Emulator as my test, (this occurs with many other applications this is just my example).

I simply open the application (Dolphin) under two conditions. First without any software using the microphone and the second is with something using the microphone.

What I use to test the microphone is opening the windows "Sound" panel (the old one with the tabs for 'Playback' 'Recording' 'Sounds' and 'Communication').

Test 1
1. Select 'Playback' tab of the Sound panel. (Ensures the microphone is not being accessed)
2. Launch Dolphin.
3. Observe the delay in launching and the program opening. There should be basically none.

Test 2
1. Select 'Recording' tab of the Sound panel. (This accesses the microphone to show the levels).
2. Launch Dolphin.
3. Observe the delay in launching. In my case this takes MUCH longer, 15+ seconds compared to <1s.
 

Further if you repeat test 2 and while Dolphin is 'stuck' opening, switching to the playback tab in the sound panel should result in Dolphin immediately launching in response.

Again this applies to many different applications and games, Dolphin is just really quick to test. Some games outright crash under scenario 2. Elden Ring for example will just fail to launch for instance.

I have more info related to this from my own research but I won't info dump here if it's unrelated.


Addendum 2/16/2025

Decided to update this since I remembered as somebody else encountered this issue on the Antlion Discord server and asked if I had figured anything out.

I have no complete solution but I did have some success using HidHide
https://github.com/nefarius/HidHide
 

This program lets you basically whitelist or blacklist devices to certain applications. So you can set it up to allow access to the ModMic ONLY to a few select programs (Discord, Mumble etc...) and other applications should generally not even know it exists.

This seems to help since I think what is happening is applications that don't really need access to the mic are constantly polling the device for some reason and it's causing the app to lag, or at worst cause system-wide lag.

That said, I'd strongly urge you if you have this issue to submit a bug report to the Windows Audio team following the instructions here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/audio/audio-devices-troubleshooting

They seem relatively active at fixing issues like this, they probably just need enough reports to warrant investigating it (and more data helps too).

[pairo]

Hah, I didn't realize @KnightSirius already edited his post on this thread - made an account just for this

 

Anyway, also posted the workaround to reddit. You don't have to add Discord.exe either (since that's under a version specific subfolder) - the Update.exe in the root folder will do just fine! I mostly had issues with the Dolphin emulator, but some games were not playing nicely either.