Audio issues in l4d2

[OFaceSIG]

Anyone else having issues with audio in l4d2? During gameplay and lots of simultaneous sounds firing at once the volume seems to drop and it's not as crisp. l4d2 is the only game giving me issues. I'm wondering if it has to do with win7's openal audio model.

I think I'm going to build an XP box and see if I get similar issues. Maybe directsound3d won't have similar issues.

 

[Rossi~]

I had issues with L4D and W7 when the soundcard was set to let applications take control, i unticked this and have left it and never had issues since. Though this may have been shoddy drivers that have been updated since.

 

[djoye]

Do you have Crystalizer and CMSS-3D or SVM enabled (in Audio Control Panel), SVM particularly. Crystalizer and CMSS-3D seem to make sounds muddy to me and SVM is apparently an audio normalizing 'feature' so it will screw with your volume if it thinks it needs to.

 

[OFaceSIG]

Do you have Crystalizer and CMSS-3D or SVM enabled (in Audio Control Panel), SVM particularly. Crystalizer and CMSS-3D seem to make sounds muddy to me and SVM is apparently an audio normalizing 'feature' so it will screw with your volume if it thinks it needs to.

I do have SVM enabled and that makes sense. I will try that. Thanks for pointing it out.

 

[taiyoyuden]

You can turn DirectSound3D on in source games (and not the software based Miles Sound System) by doing snd_legacy_surround 1. On Vista/7, you would have to use ALchemy to "transmute" it into OpenAL calls for it to work properly though. If anyone knows how to do this properly with L4D 1 or 2, please let me/us know how. Right now I have it with game path, C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\left 4 dead 2, Buffers: 4, Duration: 10. I'm not sure if this is right.

 

[djoye]

You can turn DirectSound3D on in source games (and not the software based Miles Sound System) by doing snd_legacy_surround 1. On Vista/7, you would have to use ALchemy to "transmute" it into OpenAL calls for it to work properly though. If anyone knows how to do this properly with L4D 1 or 2, please let me/us know how. Right now I have it with game path, C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\left 4 dead 2, Buffers: 4, Duration: 10. I'm not sure if this is right.

For Source engine games it's buffers: 5, duration: 10, voices: 128.

I manually add the game to ALchemy using the registry key, this is 64bit WIN7/Vista:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Valve\Steam\InstallPath

Then check 'install into sub folder': and put this:
SteamApps\common\left 4 dead 2\

Then of course make sure you set snd_legacy_surround 1 in the console. I can't get 7.1 sound unless I use the above configuration.

 

[obobski]

Do you have Crystalizer and CMSS-3D or SVM enabled (in Audio Control Panel), SVM particularly. Crystalizer and CMSS-3D seem to make sounds muddy to me and SVM is apparently an audio normalizing 'feature' so it will screw with your volume if it thinks it needs to.

SVM is their Dynamic Compressor, Crystalizer is their Dynamic Expander (and somehow they think its smart to suggest users to have both of these on at once, as if the 1 dB of dynamic range currently found in music isn't bad enough)

as djoye said, SVM can mess with things, if the sound is "too loud" it can attempt to defeat it, with Crystalizer it can then basically get you into hard-clipping with almost no input volume (ain't that awesome? )

so I'd disable this stuff while gaming (Crystalizer at 10-30% can actually be ok for some games, makes the gunshots and whatnot a bit punchier, but if you leave everything at default 50% it can get nasty)

You can turn DirectSound3D on in source games (and not the software based Miles Sound System) by doing snd_legacy_surround 1. On Vista/7, you would have to use ALchemy to "transmute" it into OpenAL calls for it to work properly though. If anyone knows how to do this properly with L4D 1 or 2, please let me/us know how. Right now I have it with game path, C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\left 4 dead 2, Buffers: 4, Duration: 10. I'm not sure if this is right.

+1

 

[OFaceSIG]

Madd good advice. I installed l4d2 on XP last night and turned everything off and it seemed a bit better. Going to again in 7 tonight. Thanks for all the advice guys.

 

[OFaceSIG]

After turning off all the extras the sound is crisper in game. But still not stellar compared to titles like mw2. Think the sound engine in l4d1/2 is just weak.

 

[Rossi~]

For me L4D2 sounds much better than any other game i own (apart from MW2).

 

[djoye]

I think the Source engine uses the Miles sound system. Whatever it is I've never been terribly impressed with it, it's quite mediocre and seems to be limited to some very generic audio effects, I guess it's kinda like EAX1 in software mode, heh. I think the best thing the Half-Life 2 series had going for it audio-wise was the music; the sound effects and environmental effects weren't terrible but weren't exactly very deep, I would say they were quite dry. Playing Team Fortress 2, sometimes your character's voice has an echo to it when they're shouting outside in an open area and sometime the effect isn't there; it's like the game is grossly limiting the number of audio voices/channels it uses. Many times in TF2, sounds get cut off because another sound takes priority over it. It's like the game is limited to 16 voices and don't be walking through the water because the splash sound will cancel out any other important sounds!

I really hope they update the Source engine before releasing much more stuff, OpenAL and DX10+ support would be nice. I think Valve looks at the system information gathered through Steam hardware surveys and says, "people are still using onboard sound and 16MB video cards so we should develop software that those people can use". I think the Source engine is a nice engine but it could use some modernizing.