lost_soul on 29/1/2011 at 21:33
Tell me about it. I recently switched back from using wireless headphones 90% of the time to using corded ones for gaming. I had gotten used to flat sound with no highs or lows and a lot of "ssssssss" in the background from the wireless set. The corded ones sound like three times better, and they were about 1/5 the price of the wireless ones.
Now I just use the wireless ones when I want to walk away from the PC and keep listening to something. In theory though, if you get some wireless ones that transmit the sound digitally, they could actually sound half decent. Latency might become a problem though.
So, if you think integrated audio is craptastic, try wireless headphones that cost under $200.
Nameless Voice on 1/2/2011 at 22:15
Quote Posted by lost_soul
Add this on to the list a mile long of things that could be improved if they would release the source code to Thief.
But Thief already supports 44K PCM wave audio. The only problem is that the original Thief sounds have been butchered by IMA AD/PCM compression. If you were to replace them with high-quality sounds, they'd play just fine.
Child Of Karras on 5/2/2011 at 21:35
Quote Posted by Nameless Voice
But Thief already supports 44K PCM wave audio. The only problem is that the original Thief sounds have been butchered by IMA AD/PCM compression. If you were to replace them with high-quality sounds, they'd play just fine.
Not completely true... When working on my sound enhancement pack I noticed that e.g. the music in the first mission of T2 was playing at half speed after conversion to 44 kHz. I don't know exactly why, maybe it's because it was arranged in a "song". After reconversion to 22 kHz it was normal again. There was another case like that I don't remember...
Muzman on 6/2/2011 at 02:46
Internal audio chips aren't bad at all these days. The last two boards I've had have used not particularly flash realtek jobs and they have been great (speaking as someone who's paid loads for Turtle Beach cards and the like to avoid the Creative hell most people were in). Not Terratec, I'd wager, but light years ahead of what it was even five or six years ago.
The biggest obstacle, as mentioned, is thief sounds were typically 8bit sounds stored as 4bit IMA. 8bit introduces lots of hiss all by itself (there's a technical reason for this that I've forgotten). It's not so bad on narrow range stuff like speech, but everything else suffers a great deal. Just upping the bitrate to 16 pushes most of the bad stuff to above 11-12khz where it's not as big a deal.
I'm pretty sure this won't happen on the fly (could probably be done, but there's no call for it).
What out friend up top is probably observing is that the outputs on his new doohickey have much better bass extension than the old one.
Jason Moyer on 6/2/2011 at 03:12
Quote Posted by Child Of Karras
Not completely true... When working on my sound enhancement pack I noticed that e.g. the music in the first mission of T2 was playing at half speed after conversion to 44 kHz. I don't know exactly why, maybe it's because it was arranged in a "song". After reconversion to 22 kHz it was normal again. There was another case like that I don't remember...
If the engine is playing everything at 22kHz, and you convert the sounds from 22kHz to 44, it's going to take twice as long to play since it's playing twice as much data.
Nameless Voice on 6/2/2011 at 03:22
Not everything, just "songs".
