Hi there.
I am not sure if it is much of use for everybody, but I still would like to share how MOD Duo X was able to somewhat extend my gaming experience.
Some gaming context:
There are some PvP shooter games, like PUBG, and Hunt: Showdown, where teams of players roam quite a huge maps, teams are hostile to each other, and usually no one exactly knows positions of other teams. Sudden meeting of an enemy team somewhere in the bushes or buildings leads to a gunfight, where your team’s chances to survive largely depend on spotting enemy first, as soon as time-to-kill in such games is often quite small (you do not need a lot of bullets to take down a player).
In such gameplay (especially in Hunt: Showdown), audio perception might be sometimes even more important than visuals - so you would be able to hear enemy steps behind the wall, crows triggering to the players and flying away, fallen branch cracking under strangers feet, or to quickly understand direction to the distant gunshots.
Hearing enemies before actually seeing them can help you to set an ambush to have advantage, or just evade the encounter.
What I did before
Starting with Pubg and switching to Hunt later, I was tending to push volume up to be able to hear even distant sounds/steps/whatever to get that advantage, but it leads to stunning volume peaks when something actually loud happens near me- slashing zombie with an axe, or firing guns myself.
As result I had to tune volume back and forth manually, but you cannot always predict when loud sounds will happen. So it ends up being bad for my hearing anyway,
How MOD Duo X helps me with that
With one of the latest firmware updates, MDX is able to be connected as an audio card, and after enabling this experimental feature I am able to stream game audio to it. By using pedalboard with a chain as just as simple as [Stereo-input-gain]->[Stereo hard-limiter ]-> [Output gain] I was able to achieve what I wanted for years - I am able to hear quiet sounds clearly from the MDX headphones output, but when things go really loud - I am not hurt by the loud blasts.
Other considerations
It is a simple PoC and I am still exploring this approach. Probably I can also try adding some EQ, or maybe I can find some better way than a hard limiter, or add some on the fly switches for changing for certain situations and bind them to the footswitches, for example “some additional input gain boost and eq tuning especially for sitting in the bushes to listen for distant steps”.
I believe that something similar could be achieved with virtual cables, voicemeter, etc, but my attempts to do that were a mess, and obviously offloading this job to MDX saves computing resources that are better to spent for game itself.
Also, I have to mention that it is not a pure advantage - actually I am trading game sounds distance perception for perceiving that some audio event happens and its direction, as sound compression eats dynamics.
That’s it. Hope somebody would find it a fun way to make additional use of mod devices.
P.S. Watching youtube videos through shiroverb plugin is priceless - everything becomes a horror movie.
