Distorted sound while playing

[Helfdane]

I don't know what triggered it, but no clue how to fix it either. Reinstalled all drivers etc etc.
It's clearly audible in this vid I recorded: Vid[www.twitch.tv] (after 8 seconds clearly audible).

Where there should be a steady audio stream, it gets choppy and the volume gets dimmed or the channel squeezed or something. It only happens on the battlefield, not in the mech bay for instance, then the sound is good. CPU never comes above 65% load. Other games I don't notice it either.

Any idea on how to solve it?

Recording software: OBS.

[MrMilkshake]

This is a guess but you might have either the levels too high or you have too many sources of sound for the system to handle. Each weapon sound, every step, warning sound etc is a sound source and if you have music or something playing too it can cause this effect. I play this through a large amp and speaker set up and get this sometimes if i have music playing and i'm on Discord.

Does it do this if you only have game sound and nothing else ?

[Maddermax]

I must admit, I can barely hear the sounds over the music, but perhaps test it in Testing Grounds and see if it does it there.

Do you have any sound mods installed at all that might be affecting it?

[Helfdane]

@Maddermax: yes, I have the soundpack from Baradul, but the sound was good (including the music). It only started like two weeks ago without any changes.

@MrMilkShake: If I only have the game sounds, I don't notice it. I think only the music channel is affected. And about the levels, what levels are you hinting about?

[MrMilkshake]

If you are using a recording device the volume input levels will need to be balanced so that they do not peak and cause distortion or the effect you are experiencing. Doing something as simple as turning the volume down on the music you are using will help.

Try right clicking the volume icon in the task bar and open up the mixer. Adjusting sound levels here is simple and should solve all problems.

**Edit
Just checked the software you are using and it has an audio mixer. Would be better to adjust sound levels here. But same as before, try taking the channel that has the outside music you are using down a bit and you should be fine. Im sure you already know this but red is bad.

[Helfdane]

Tuned down the graphis a lot (shadows/reflection/detail etc). Tuned down the mixer, it looked like it worked, but then another map loaded and it was crap again. At a loss here...

Thing is, it happens without OBS as well, so I don't think OBS is the problem.

[Ishan451]

Remove sound mod?

[Helfdane]

I'm not sure the mod is it. It's just a bunch of replacement wav's. Besides, I've been playing with the mod for like 5 months now, not a single problem.

I feel it happened with the reinstall of the MWO-client I did two weeks ago, but no clue what changed. in the config.

[Ishan451]

If you remove the sound mod you could contact the official support. I am not sure they would help if you were using a mod (and i am still not entirely sure if its not a bannable offense)

Besides.. it might be worth a try to remove the mod... worst case, you have to reapply it, but at least you can say for certain its not the mod.

[MrMilkshake]

Originally posted by Helfdane:

Tuned down the graphis a lot (shadows/reflection/detail etc). Tuned down the mixer, it looked like it worked, but then another map loaded and it was crap again. At a loss here...

Thing is, it happens without OBS as well, so I don't think OBS is the problem.

Graphics wont help audio problems but it will make the game run a heap better so never a bad shout anyway. Dude just try setting ALL of your levels at half. Check the coloured bars and make sure they dont go up any further than that, Do a test record and see if that does it. The more i think about this the more im convinced it's this.

Unless you have some other setting on by accident, Like high gain , bass boost, Vocal booster anything like that.

Failing that what Ishan said is probably your last recourse.

[Maddermax]

Yeah, remove the sound mod, run a file integrity check or whatever it is that steam does to make sure the files are ok, try again. If it fixes the issue, reinstall the sound mod using a new download.

A couple of weeks ago would have been from around patch time right? Possible it’s a mixer issue of some sort, possible it’s something that’s just stopped quite working with the update.

Edit: oh, didn’t realise it was just replacement WAVs. Might still be worth taking out, just in case, but try repairing/checking integrity first if it’s difficult.

[SinewPower]

I have the sound issue in MWO too. It started after a recent windows 10 update (1 or 2 months I can't remember).

I had not modified the sounds or changed there drivers. I'm using an X-Fi for my sound card.

For me it generally happens when there are a few mechs around me and people are firing or getting hit by LRMs or MRMs.

I believe it is related to network latency not the actual sound system itself. I tuned my intel network adapter settings to be more latency focused and that seemed to help a lot but didn't eliminate the issue. I still hear the corruption but not very often and it's not too bad now.

You can use a program like LatencyMon to find if something in your system is taking time away from audio processing.

[Helfdane]

Woa! You put me onto something Jether! Did some system maintenance (cleaning fans etc), also disabled CPU throttling, and now it seems it's gone! Tried one match, but didn't notice any distortion on my sound.

Gonna try a few matches later tonight and see if it's truly gone, but apparently some program set my CPU speed to 5% speed on the default power saving schedule (so only when temp gets above some level, it scales down tremendously). Set it to 100% again with cpu monitoring on (don't wanna burn through my CPU), but so far it's dandy again and cpu is on a steady 39% degrees Celsius!

*smooch* ;-)

[KickyMcAssington]

reviving a dead thread but for me the cause of the sound distortion and "over-saturation" of channels was the sound mod I had installed, removed it and 100% fixed.