Sound may not be as bad as we think!

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R35-Vspec
Try Creative T20 (or T40 if you can afford) with Fiio E17 headphone amp which can be used with speakers as well and plug a digital audio cable from your PS3 to Fiio and power up your creative speakers.

I Use Creative T20 speakers (max bass/treble) with Fiio E17 (max bass/treble/gain) and the sound you get is very very clear. The bass may shake your room beware!
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Crystal clear playback of the incorrect sounds will not address the issues we have highlighted :)
 
helseth
Remember: I'm the one who's actually enjoying the game.
That being said, people are talking about the closest possible sound to RL and those YT examples are far from it.

In Large theatre mode and using 5.1 GT gives enough audible feedback to tell which tyre slips and from which direction the opposition are aproaching. Living room mode compresses the samples to a point where you need to relly more on visible helpers to detect tyre slippage.
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This and This and This.

I´m not using a 5k set of speakers. They are a Plasma 5.1, with 5.25" woofers and a 10" SW. In LARGE THEATER MODE the sound changes quite drastically from the stock settings.

I´ll tell you something. I happen to have a friend who races a Yamaha R6. When that bike revs (w/o muffler) and you are 5 feet apart you think you are going to die. Seriously. You just can´t stand the noise (glorious). Whenever you see a video of that bike on youtube or facebook you just can´t replicate it on any way. There it feels really like a vacumm cleaner.
 
I changed the sound mode in game to large theater and it made quite a difference. very large difference in tone and volume when switching between cockpit and roof views. Definitely seemed to be better sound than in living room mode but not nearly such level volume.
 
DonJo76
The onboard sound you will get when driving would be very different as you can hear in chris harris F40 F50 video.
But JEEEEEEEZ, this is absolutly the best sounding ferrari ever!
Detuned F1 engine. I can listen to this al day!
What do you think about why this car isnt in the game?
EA licence? or something else?
A true shame, because we do have the f40 and f60
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I really think it's just a case of almost random selection, and the F50 still hasn't made the cut unfortunately. I do wonder if Kaz only selects new premium cars for the game if he can get hold of a really good example to laser scan, mic, etc. The F50 is a rare car, though not as rare as the Cizeta V16T, and in the good old Best Motoring days, there was at least one F50 in Japan, hence the battles. I also think that Kaz puts a lot of personal preference into the cars that go into the game, and maybe he doesn't like the look of the F50 (many don't) so it's not at the top of his list of premium supercars to get into GT5, not a car he personally dreams about as such.

It's all speculation of course, an expert mathematician couldn't come up with a formula to accurately explain the selection process PD uses for cars that go into GT! :)
 
Vagabond
I know what you're saying and I was being a little facetious, yes but you know, Pink Floyd sound awesome on my hand picked component hi-fi system. But they also sound pretty damn good through my little poxy headphones on my phone and even through bluetooth on my mini-boombox. If a sound is the real deal, it shouldn't actually matter that the speakers aren't concert standard (as long as they're not complete crap of course).

Pick any speakers you like....

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I remember the first time watching that and I shipped my pants

EDIT:

I have a video of a 458 speciale or whatever it was called starting up and going through an open underground tunnel. If you have nice High Quality headphones you should hear it good and be able to tell me talking to my dad and the people around me..

As for what type of system you have, I find it really doesn't matter. My 25 dollar Apple EarPods create so far the best audio range I've ever heard. I've never been able to experience hearing wind with a standard camcorder (if you understood any of that.. Otherwise, when a camera doesn't have the foam muffle over the mic, it produces the garbage sounding static you hear. However, these EarPods will do the justice)

My EarPods actually are better than my 100 dollar sony headsets, which are probably the best sounds you can get for 7.1. I also have a 7.1 surround setup in my basement and it is great as well. Not that good for V8's but awesome for the V10's. I can't wait to try it with the R18.. I also own a sennhieser RS 180 and that by far was a grave mistake....

I'm gonna have to say in the end, 25 dollar EarPods is where I'll be putting my money for the rest of my audible life
 
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Has anyone tried to play GT6 with quality 5.1 or 7.1, large theatre, and sound effect volume at 70 to 80, I used this volume and I cranked the volume of my Harman Kardon instead, the tire noise seems to be less distorted :) I used Mordaunt Short Carnival 5.1 set. I like how the S14 Zenki sound now and the tire noise when on the limit is great.
 
Ridox2JZGTE
Has anyone tried to play GT6 with quality 5.1 or 7.1, large theatre, and sound effect volume at 70 to 80, I used this volume and I cranked the volume of my Harman Kardon instead, the tire noise seems to be less distorted :) I used Mordaunt Short Carnival 5.1 set. I like how the S14 Zenki sound now and the tire noise when on the limit is great.
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I tried 70 on one of my sony audio box (whether it's called) .... System made a huge pop and had to reset. Scared me for a few seconds
 
I love the sound, some need to get better system or change the sound settings in the game.
 
Zuel
I love the sound, some need to get better system or change the sound settings in the game.
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One shouldn't have to buy a sound system to achieve the supposedly great sound you claim. Also many have messed with sounds. It's quite the deflection to say, "well if you buy a better sound system you'll be fine" especially from a prolific user with GT bias.
 
Nice sound 👍

By the way, I notice that he's driving with an open window ... Isn't it more optimal regarding aerodynamics to drive with the window closed? ... but I guess that it's more pleasant to drive with the window open when it's not a real race. :)

I suppose the sound should be different when you're driving an open cockpit car, but they still ought to emulate the muffeling effect of a crash helmet ... unless they expect us to wear a helmet when driving GT6 - which would again increase the realism. Man, the combinations of options are quickly increasing if you want to simulate everything. :)
 
I don't usually either, although I have done it on a couple of occations, but only when I'm home alone so I can crank the stereo. :embarrassed:
I usually just wear my racing shoes with my normal clothes.
 
The Problem with the sound is simply the whole thing! That excuse of soundsystems is ridiculous...
A Need for Speed, Forza, Grid 2 and what else have you will sound decent even on small laptop speakers. Yep you lose the bass and rumble but you still hear the powerful sound and everything else which is there.
The Problem with GT is not only the samples which being used and being pitched to unbearable points. It's also everything else which brings sound to "life".

GT is missing clutch engagement sounds, a gear shift isn't done within lightspeed. And all the GT sound engine does is pitching the sound from the high rev down to the low rev in the next second. Also trainsmission wobble is missing.
Then you have the problem that most of the mixed sounds are wrong. Engine noises are too loud. Or missing in-take sounds.
Every car uses the same Turbo sound aswell as the BOV sound which is sometimes even louder than everything else when you shift. And it's always the same. No matter what car and how much pressure it has.
Turbochargers and compressors are also not really noticeable. As example a Mini Cooper S in reallife screams like crazy when it's under load. Same for a Shelby GT500.

Then you have the exhausts and engines. The most brutal part of the sound. The way how a V12 will scream when you downshift out the pipes or the brutal screaming of a V10. The deep growl of a V8. All those things are certainly missing. There is so much to add. Which make sounds more "alive".

The sound in GT works very basic. Car Sample = Low Rev usually nice. Middle range to High range pitched up artificial to an unnatural level. Gearchange sounds? None at all. Transmission whine very basic and way too loud in general. There is way more to say.


All those things are very important. Not only the samples. Many other games do that aspects already right.
 
Cosbuster
Does a better sound system make V12s sound like V8s and vice versa? It's like buying a 4k TV to watch 640x480 videos better. The problem is in the source, not our end.
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I love when people also think that we have tons of disposable income to just make these upgrades at any time willing, oh if only the spent a day in other people's shoes.
 
zzz_pt
A lot of people complain about bad sounds because they're playing with bad quality speakers/H7/etc. The quality of your equipment enhance the quality of ingame sounds. I know what I'm saying because I bought a decent H7 now (Astro 40) and it's a completly different experience than I had with my TV.
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Well I certainly hope that's the case (I may find out at Christmas), as GT5 through £4k worth or AV system still sounded appalling for the vast majority of cars on anything but idle.
 
Scaff
Well I certainly hope that's the case (I may find out at Christmas), as GT5 through £4k worth or AV system still sounded appalling for the vast majority of cars on anything but idle.
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Exactly, as I said on other threads regarding this it was reported by many users who had great sound systems that they still had bad engine sounds. In truth the real culprit is bad samples and the manipulation of frequencies of a certain sample on more than one vehicle. I think we all get that getting samples from a 1000+ cars is impossible, but considering the duplications and shared engine packages between models then it becomes less.

Also why not get Sony to hire an outside group to do this for PD, that specialize in sounds on various levels and thus PD don't have to worry so much about gathering and just implementing.
 
bodger
Although some cars are obviously disappointing and have a very generic engine sample, a lot are actually fine.

I think the key to PDs problems with the sounds were alluded to by the US producer's comments in a recent interview. I think he was basically saying that other development houses artificially boost the engine sounds, whereas PD are basically simulating how the sound is projected from the actual point of view.

A case in point here is if you take some cars and then go to the cockpit view, and then switch to the external rear view, Suddenly, it turns from being a dulled vacuum cleaner sound to a nice throaty roar. Obviously, they are simulating the difference between being insulated in the cockpit, to the tail pipe noise.

It isn't that they can't do the noise simulation correctly, it's just the way they are actually implementing this realistic Point of view thing.
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I get your point ... maybe i'm wrong but what about the damping of sound due to in car point of view and even ... the helmet on? is that what Kaz is trying to achieve? he is such a perfectionist ... maybe he even simulated the fact that you are sitting in the car with your helmet on .. :confused: ... anybody?
 
This was said almost a year ago, and i think this is still a pretty good answer about the sounds in GT.


Famine
There was a translator present - just not Translator-san (who I'm told has broken his ankle - get well soon Translator-san!) - and Yamauchi rarely speaks in English at all, let alone full interviews.

However, invoking "lost in translation", I kind of understand what he's getting at, even if I don't necessarily agree.

"Sound" is a complex field - it's not as simple as recording a noise and playing it back. A really basic example is how you sound differently on a tape recorder than you do in your head. While I'm sure that how they record sounds isn't necessarily how I'd do it (doing it on a dyno is sensible - loading the engine with no road noise), the simple fact is that you will not be able to tell the difference on an equaliser between the real car and the GT5 one. It'll be the same pitch (frequency) spectrum at, if you choose, the same volume. This is what I suspect Kazunori means by "too real" - 1:1 on the equaliser.

This isn't the problem with GT5's sounds. The problem is what he refers to as "sexier" sounds - or what musicians will know as timbre. If you play two musical instruments at the same pitch and same volume an equaliser will show no difference - but they're different, aren't they? You know how you can tell between a synthesiser version of an instrument and a real instrument - or a human voice and autotune? This is due to timbre - timbre is what gives "sexiness" to sound. You can even tell between two identical instruments played entirely in synch with each other due to timbre...

What constitutes timbre is tough to pin down - it's essentially every characteristic of a sound that isn't the frequency or volume :lol: It's often referred to as "sound colour" and you'll hear terms bandied about like ADSR (attack [the start of a note], decay [normalisation from the attack to the sustain], sustain [the intended note], release [return to zero]), but it's really tough to explain and even tougher to compress and shove onto a CD/DVD/BD, uncompress, dynamically simulate and allow space for a game.

What many games do to substitute for timbre is make it louder and add more bass - because we associate noise, particularly bassy noise, with feeling. If you can feel the noise move through you it feels more "real" (and at real race tracks, sound hits you like a wall). Shoved through a set of TV speakers, it sounds "better" than the quieter and more accurate (in terms of the equaliser) note. GT games don't do this (with the exception of GTHD) and so, through TV speakers, they sound like ass because there is neither real feeling nor fake feeling - just the frequencies and volume. They sound better if you have speakers with better range and quicker reactions or if you have a good amp to dig the sounds out (on the pair of monitor speakers I usually use for gaming, GT5 sounds fine, if a little vague sometimes. Good enough at least that my wife can hear I'm driving a V8, three walls and a floor away) but the lack of timbre or a substitute for it prevents the realism.

There's certainly more they could do. Sound recording needs to be primarily in the driver's seat for cockpit, in the engine for nosecam, two feet behind and four feet above the car for coptercam (though winding in some essence of the other two for each will help add character). It needs to be pushed through a spectrometer rather than an equaliser before being passed as satisfactory. It needs to be optimised for different settings - the ghacky 2W TV speakers most people play through, a stereo system, a basic surround system (2.1), a middle surround system (5.1), a geeky surround system (7.1) and a full cinema system (what's this up to now? 14.2?).

Or they could make it louder and add bass.

Take "real" as "faithful frequency and amplitude reproduction" and take "sexier" as "better timbre or bassier/noisier" and the response makes sense.
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https://www.gtplanet.net/forum/thre...wer-regarding-gt5s-sound.267536/#post-7779760

This is what @mykem probably means with:

mykem
Improvement to car sound will always be welcome but I'm finding, even in GT5, that a good headphones and headphone amps make a world of difference. For around $60 (even less from Amazon), you can get a decent amp like the FIFO E11 that can drive pretty much any headphones to a decent level and add a nice hump to the lower midrange and upper bass. I'm using mine with the Sony MDR-7506 (the standard studio headphone).

Don't let the photo fool you, it's a small amp (much smaller than a portable HDD):
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GTP_Ingram
You're completely contradicting yourself between here and the Audi R8 clip. You say it isn't possible to replicate the R8's sound precisely as it is impossible to represent the loud full-load exhaust and quiet idle proportionally, which is maybe fair enough, but then you say it is impossible to replicate the Sauber's sound because it is recorded with a low quality mic and encoded at a low bitrate.

The point is, if it can sound great with one watt speakers through a crappy YouTube clip, then it will sound great on anything.
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The problem is that "great" is not the same thing as "accurate" in most cases. I've played enough NFS to know that, at least.

The thing about YouTube clips is that they're missing a lot of information that would be present in the real deal, but your brain fills that in (and anything you can imagine is often better than the real thing, anyway). Distortion implies "loud", and "loud" implies "good". It's like pouring syrup over everything. Fine if you like syrup, but there are other flavours around...

Obviously GT6 has the same old sampling issues, but people really do need to realise that you cannot use a YouTube video in a game, just because it sounds "good" (as above) on whatever tinbox you happen to be playing it back on. You start with the real sound (as best as possible), and then mangle it "for the masses".


I hate this "if it'll sound good on TV speakers, it'll sound good on anything" attitude - it is utterly false (syrup!). You need to mix and master separately for each hardware setup, but remember that you can never add detail!
 
@Griffith500 As I also stated before it's not only the samples. If they would put attention to the details I mentioned they could even make their bad current sound samples more alive. But the whole thing is missing. The soundengine is too basic. There arent enough different layers. They only have. 1. Car Sample Engine 2. Car Sample Exhaust 3. Turbo/BOV. 4. Transmission. Those are used without filters and Soundengine relevant plug-ins between the layers to simulate the other things around. Such as the gear changing. When you change the gear another step has to follow. The clutch engagement. Thats missing, and makes it also sound very unnatural because everything that happens in this moment is that the samples changes from point A to point B within the next second.

The whole engine lacks at details. It's not only the samples.

I wouldn't say I am an expert on sound design but I produce music for quiet a while now to know how things generally work.
 
DonZonda
@Griffith500 As I also stated before it's not only the samples. If they would put attention to the details I mentioned they could even make their bad current sound samples more alive. But the whole thing is missing. The soundengine is too basic. There arent enough different layers. They only have. 1. Car Sample Engine 2. Car Sample Exhaust 3. Turbo/BOV. 4. Transmission. Those are used without filters and Soundengine relevant plug-ins between the layers to simulate the other things around. Such as the gear changing. When you change the gear another step has to follow. The clutch engagement. Thats missing, and makes it also sound very unnatural because everything that happens in this moment is that the samples changes from point A to point B within the next second.

The whole engine lacks at details. It's not only the samples.

I wouldn't say I am an expert on sound design but I produce music for quiet a while now to know how things generally work.
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Most of what you said is covered by samples - that's what "layers" are. And there is no "sound of the clutch engaging", that's from the drivetrain physics, which needs to be rebuilt from the ground up for GT.

Driving the sounds off the physics is the best way, there's no point hot-rodding the sound-engine to add incidental effects (i.e. more samples...), because that's not how it works in real life.

The engine has been tweaked since GT5, it seems it dynamically allocates channels here and there now, which means it may be possible to have more channels per car. That means more "layers", but I expect we'll be waiting for the patch.
 
I love the "You need better speakers" argument from some people.

*whips out e-penis*
I guess dropping £7500+ on REL, Musical Fidelity, Monitor Audio and Audiolab components, then connecting it all up with The Chord Company and Van Den Hul wiring wasn't enough. How much more should I have spent? £20k? £30k? More? Seems a lot of money to spend on a video game.

I'm also guessing that when almost every other racing game sounds absolutely sublime through my system, it's all a part of my delusion or some sort of placebo effect.

There are aspects of GT's sound engine that are actually very good, namely the doppler effect and the way the sound echoes in different environments, but the sound samples themselves, for the most part, are synthesized garbage and missing an awful lot of details/life.
 

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