Engine Sound Bug

[HoneyBadger]

I thought the engine sound bugs were resolved by the various patches up to this point. While driving the 330 P4 on the 650pp A-Spec 4 seasonal (the ring) found that the engine sound decreased dramatically after passing a car.

Does this problem only exist with a handful of cars at this point? Had not noticed it until driving the 330 P4 today.

 

[GUMP07]

I started a thread similar to this but I don't know how to post a link from the my iPhone app.

You can jump to it by searching my threads.

But we still don't have a solution to the problem,just discussion.

 

[VBR]

The engine sounds go down after slightly hitting a barrier too, takes ages for them to come back up to normal. Very annoying indeed!

 

[moxlox]

The engine sounds go down after slightly hitting a barrier too, takes ages for them to come back up to normal. Very annoying indeed!

This is driving me nuts!! Of all the things I'd like fixed in the next patch it is the sound. Just get it back to how is used to be, not the sound going muffled for 10 seconds after you hit a barrier or the sound of another car completely overcoming the sound of your own car.

 

[eran0004]

Basically when you work with audio through speakers you have a point where the audio is 100%. If you go above that, you don't get higher volume, but instead you get distortion. So instead of working with absolute volume, you have to work with relative volume. The volume of the engine, for instance, can't be constant throughout the entire time, or there won't be enough space left for the other sounds. So when driving alone in low speeds, the engine sounds would be the dominant, perhaps occupying 70% of total volume available. Now, if another car catches up with you, and that engine sound would have to occupy 50% of total volume, then you can't have 120% volume because that would be distortion. Instead you would have to reduce the volume of both sounds to fit withint the 100% range, only keeping the relation between them. So your engine sound would then go from 70% of total volume to 7/12th of total volume (about 57%), while the other car's engine sound would go from 50% to 5/12th, or about 43% volume.

Another trick that's common when you work with sudden, loud noise, is to, instead of inserting an incredibly loud BANG! (that wouldn't be louder than a bird's tweet, scince all you've got to work with is those 100%) you cut the volume drastically, almost muting, to give an impression of a loud noise that blends all other sounds out.

It doesn't always work great, and sometimes the balance is not right, but that's the theory anyway.

 

[Griffith500]

GT does away with all that complexity by offering realistic volume variations, except that it can optionally cap the output dynamically by "compressing" it. What this means is that the mix is static, and not optimised for the higher compression settings.

Turn off dynamic range compression (select "Large Theatre") and see if the problem persists.

Remember that this compression is done in software, so it's not likely to be of that great a quality given everything else the game is doing.
One of its obvious flaws is that it has noticeable "wind-up" (because of its simplistic design, and the requirement for fast response, this is kind of inevitable), which can cause loud sounds to leave the compressor at a high compression ratio long after that sound has passed. Another flaw is that it compresses all frequencies equally, whilst, psycho-acoustically speaking, you should compress each frequency differently, because the ear has a different sensitivity to each frequency - halving the volume of one frequency will not necessarily make it sound half as loud to our ears.

If you have a hardware (or at least external) compressor, i.e. in your TV or receiver, try using that instead of the game's - it will almost certainly be better. Note that with "Large Theatre" you will probably have to adjust your volumes in the game menu if you use music - turn music all the way up and the engine and sound effects down to 30 ish as starting point.