I've looked around for an answer for this and have come up empty so far, and my knowledge of such things clearly isn't enough for me to fix it, or I wouldn't be here.

Here's the issue as best as I can describe it . . .

1. vMix running on my desktop, with a camcorder (no audio) and a Blue Yeti connected (USB).
2. Desktop is also running NDI as an input from my laptop.
3. Laptop is running vMix Capture.

I heard this odd, cyclical static-like sound through my headphones and finally deduced, after way too much time, that I was somehow picking up the laptop's motor (or something internal) as it was working.

Using my son's gaming headphone/mic (also USB) didn't hear a lick of that sound, so I figured it was the mic.

Then I reversed the whole thing above thinking my laptop was working too hard and maybe my desktop would be quieter. So, I ran vMix and the NDI input off of my laptop, vMix Capture off of my desktop and, same darn thing! The Blue Yeti mic picked up some cyclical buzzing sound from my desktop, but my son's headphones worked fine.

Why not just use my son's headphones? I would and they sounded great, but for the videos we're producing my wife said it looked like I was landing airplanes, so they were out.

Long story short, does anyone know why this is happening and how I could fix it? The head phones didn't pick up the noise, but the Yeti mic did, though they are both through a USB port and theoretically if there were a loop of some kind, they both would have heard it.

Anyhow, this took a whole day to figure out for a 2 minute video and any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Thanks. I forgot to mention that I did play with the gain and volume for the Yeti mic, but there was zero change in what it was picking up. And with regard to the driver, it was odd that it occurred on both computers, as it was plugged in to both while I was experimenting with it.

I guess my big question is why it happened with the Yeti mic, but not with my son's head set and, and if I do get a new microphone to replace the Yeti, how do I know it won't happen again?

Thanks!

By chance, would the laptop be a Mac?

There have been releases of OSX where Apple had a bug that caused the microphone to be mixed with the speaker feed. The result was echo that could not be avoided.

I've seen this at least twice over the past few years. In both cases an update to the OS fixed the trouble.