Revolution should speak out on audio issues

[a7]

It's almost two weeks after the game's release and I haven't found Revolution's response to player comments on the Reforged version anywhere. The game was well received, but many players criticized its audio, particularly low-quality speech and unbalanced volume levels. I think the Reforged version looks very good graphically and I welcome the other improvements, but the audio should be improved too for the remaster to be complete.
Also for some players who are considering buying the new version, this is an important issue and I think it's time for Revolution to make a statement on whether this feedback is taken into consideration and if they're planning any updates to the game's audio.

UPDATE 5 Oct: So the first patch of the game fixed some audio issues and we got info that more patches are on the way, which is a good start. The speech definitely still needs to be improved.

[broken sword fan]

To be quite honest, I think the only audio they were able to really improve was the music quality. It was most likely recorded at a higher quality but originally compressed greatly to save disk space. So it was simply a matter of remastering the original source files...Or the composer did some rerecording for the directors cut version if and where they did not have the source files.
The speech audio is a different thing. I think it's unlikely they recorded it at a high quality, simply because of the sheer amount of dialog the game has. It would have been rather expensive to record that amount at high quality and store it back in 1995/1996. Even the original game had most of the disk space used for speech files. They probably tried to clean up these speech files and removed any noise artefacts, but they are what they are.

Audio mixing I do agree could be further optimised. Music and speech are quite uneven balanced. I had to put the speech volume much higher than music and sound effects to work well most of the time, but then the cut-scene audio is too low, so I am using my keyboards volume buttons quite regularly. Lets hope they introduce a fix for that at some time.

[a7]

I agree. If you look at the the Revolution Discord, there are posts by the fan AnD4D who improved speech with a modern processing tool and posted some samples. The difference in quality is substantial. He says it would take him only a couple of days to edit all the languages, the used tool is not expensive, and I personally would be happy with the quality he showed in the samples.
At the very least, Revolution should not prevent the fans from creating external audio mods. It's not an ideal solution though, as some players won't even know about them. If Revolution want just to save money, they could include some fan pack in the official game update.
As for the audio mixing, they need to do that themselves and they should definitely change it, it's really bad in some places. And they might as well add some ambient sounds, they're quite sparse currently and I think it would further improve the overall immersion of the players in the game.

[funnyml]

Originally posted by broken sword fan:

I think it's unlikely they recorded it at a high quality, simply because of the sheer amount of dialog the game has.

I doubt very much they used digital storage back then in 95/96. They probably recorded the speech and stored it on analog tapes. The problem is, those original tapes seem to be lost or deteriorated over time too much to be of use.

But I agree, the audio needs to be improved and by now they should have started working on a first patch. They could at least tell us what they decided to polish/fix first, so people can concentrate on other things.

[Skipper]

The answer is actually quite simple and the question about "why?" doesn't matter: If it really is that simple to improve the audio files, as AnD4D has shown, it would be easy for the developers to follow this lead, right?

[Winston Smith]

Actually, the story behind the bad tone is sad. 1995 was around the time when the first multi-track recordings were made on hard disc in recording studios. But DAT or other digital tape formats were actually more common for archiving. I.e. 16 bit/48khz stereo or much more, uncompressed. In other words, only a few dirt-cheap DAT tapes would have been needed to archive voice recordings in the best possible quality. We're talking about €10 per tape back then. Disappointing.

In 1995, analogue was no longer recorded professionally. Since the early 1980s it was possible to record digitally in high quality! Since 1990, private individuals had digital DAT recorders at home. The recording quality back then was just as good as it is today.

After the money was earned, they threw away the original audio recordings in the traditional way. I find that hard to understand. The first Broken Sword was a big budget production. According to Wikipedia, the game cost around £1 million back in 1996. That would be several times as much today, adjusted for inflation. The fact that you can't keep a shoebox with a few DAT tapes for that amount is beyond me. They even threw away the excellent original music. With the Reforged version, they were just lucky that Barrington Pheloung and his wife were more responsible and didn't treat the recordings of his music with such disregard.

[Winston Smith]

Originally posted by funnyml:

I doubt very much they used digital storage back then in 95/96. They probably recorded the speech and stored it on analog tapes. The problem is, those original tapes seem to be lost or deteriorated over time too much to be of use.

No, in 1995 people had been recording digitally in recording studios for many years. Back then, recording on hard disc and archiving on DAT tapes was very popular. There was no storage space problem with digital audio recordings! All the recordings of the Broken Sword soundtrack and the voice recordings for all the languages would have easily fitted on a few DAT tapes. Unfortunately, it was common practice in the games industry at the time to destroy the sources after the money was made. Back then, all it would have taken was a shoebox and a few DAT tapes to give us excellent sound quality today.

[Rich_T]

Interesting, so do you think what we have now - is the best we will ever get?
No use of tools/up-sampling will be that much of an improvement?

[Winston Smith]

Originally posted by Rich_T:

Interesting, so do you think what we have now - is the best we will ever get?
No use of tools/up-sampling will be that much of an improvement?

Well, Charles Cecil has confirmed in interviews that they threw away the sources back then. As far as I can see, there are only the voice files from the games left. In the first Broken Sword I think it was 8 bit/11 khz. That means the sound is noisy and very muffled.
On this basis and with current techniques, we now have to try to achieve the best result. I think that a lot will be possible as long as you do it wisely and with the right tools. AI would also be a possibility.
I think you can achieve a much better result than what we have at the moment in the reforgend version. But of course you won't be able to recreate the original recordings from back then even with these techniques.

One hope would be that perhaps the dubbing studios in the individual countries still have the original recordings saved. But unfortunately that is also very unlikely.
Here in Germany, the dubbing was done by Studio Fröhlich in Düsseldorf. The translations were done by Antje Hink, Rolf D. Busch and Harald Fette.

[Rich_T]

I understand, that makes sense. Thanks for reply,