I monitor the audio going to my SignaLink. I hear occasional sounds going out to the external codec when they should be directed instead to my local speaker or Headphones. This is most frequently heard when a 'Connected to station' event happens, occasionally when 'Incoming connection request' event happens. The sound is coincident with the start of my digital transmission. It happens to my friend also. I hear some sounds on his RF occasionally, when I am not talking with him. We are both computer literate (Geeks) and know all about setting some devices for Default and others for Communications default. It seems that there is a race condition in the code someplace that tries to put out the sound at (nearly) the same time as it starts the digital signal. Check it out.
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OK, I think I have a bead on this now!
If you are doing a new install and open VarAC for the first time the announcements from the program may be sent to your sound card feeding the radio by default. You can't really tell because the VarAC program may not show up initially in the Windows sound settings menu as a device. But, if it does, redirecting the announcements to another output device does nothing immediately. You MUST close VarAC and open it again. THEN your changes will take affect. You get used to making changes in Windows and seeing those changes immediately. Not so in this case. I can absolutely reproduce this behavior reliably on my Intel and ARM Win11 machines. Once you get it set it sticks so you shouldn't have to mess with it anymore. I wouldn't call this a bug but I've not seen this behavior in a program before. In any case users can get their programs configured properly, it just may take a few extra steps.
I haven't figured out why the program is listed as 'VarAC' sometimes and 'Announcements & Sounds' other times. I was testing this across a few versions of VarAC so maybe it's a change between versions.
All good!