sound clipping like crazy

[[nfc] _Shorty]

Just fired this up for the first time and couldn't even get through the intro because the sound is just clipping like crazy. Actually, it sounds like it is clipping, and it sounds like there is some weird buffer issue going on where it is quickly alternating between sound and no sound. Not sure what the deal is, as I have no issues with any other Source Engine titles, or any other titles, period.

[Reika - ᚱᛖᛁᚴᚨ]

Originally posted by Radboy16:

Originally posted by Wraggle:

Becoming nitpicky and sarcastic when you don't get your answers comes across as arsey and unhelpful. It is easy to nitpick other people, but whatever, this thread just turned into willy waving about who had more experience.

@[nfc]_Shorty I hope you get to the bottom of your sound issue.

Being nitpicky and sarcastic when people are just trying to help also comes off as arsey and unhelpful.

Basically this. Trouble shooting starts at step 1, always, then follows all the steps afterwards. If you are asked if you took step one and respond 'do you think I am stupid?' that just makes it more difficult to help someone.

If you have a problem you can't solve, just answer questions that people have if they are trying to help you out so they can check it off of their 'troubleshooting to-do list'. OP definitely wasn't very polite or straightforward.

[Wraggle]

I agree troubleshooting starts at step 1, but it also depends if the instructions are following are related to the issue.

It is an audio clipping issue thats been reported so it would be better to troubleshoot sound related things first such as the sound card, drivers, sound settings etc. If that doesn't work you can move onto broader things. I believe that is what the OP was getting annoyed about. He has a sound issue and was getting back some generic answers which he didn't see as relevant.

Anyway, back to the topic.

@[nfc] _Shorty.

Have you managed to test your headphones with the onboard dts Headphone device rather than the Dolby Surround Sound dongle? I am not overly familiar with your headphones but from what I read they come with a USB Dolby sound card that connects to your headphones.

It also seems that you can adjust what channels the headphones can use. Are you using 7.1 surround sound and can you drop it to 5.1 surround sound?

Do you still get clipping in 5.1 surround or stereo?

Do your headphones come with any Sennheiser or Dolby software, like a control panel, where you can adjust volume levels/EQ.

As you are on Windows 10, connecting headphones can enable Spatial Sound (Windows Sonic for Headphones). Has that been enabled by Windows?

[Necropolis Enthusiast]

Originally posted by Deliverance Prayer:

Originally posted by RedEye:

^This
I originally asked 5 question of which 2 were answered. Still don't know if he has a dozen broken sound mods. Helping people in a steam forum can sometimes be like pulling your own teeth without anesthetic.

Restart the computer and verify the game cache (maybe that will elicit a useful response)
https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=2037-QEUH-3335

Somehow related, once I had a BSoD in GTA IV, and only in it, right after 30-60 seconds of running the game. Other games and everything else was fine, but not GTA IV. I did some research and found that there is a bug in firmware of my GPU, and this bug was only in one of production batches.
What I am trying to say - overall stability means nothing, there is always a chance to have a specific flaw in any component of your PC, or software.

Im no expert with PC's but yes, this sounds like there may be something wrong with your GPU inded.

[[nfc] _Shorty]

With Xen released I finally revisited this.

@Wraggle, for whatever reason, on my machine it happens no matter the sound output device. Happens with the Sennheiser setup set to 7.1, 5.1, or off/stereo. Happens with the motherboard's dts. Happens with the Nvidia HDMI sound output to my monitor's speakers. I have, however, figured out a workaround that doesn't make too much sense:

snd_mixahead 0.05

Now, being a sound output buffer, this would seem to make perfect sense. However, the reason it doesn't make much sense is every single other game that uses the same engine functions just fine with the default snd_mixahead 0.025, so I'm not sure what might be going on with Black Mesa that is causing it to fall behind with the default buffer size. You would think that if any other title using the engine works fine that Black Mesa would also work fine, but whatever the reason, it seems to be buffer-starved at the usual default value.

After trying snd_mixahead 0.1 (a deliberately high value that might normally be considered too high, just to see if this might solve it, which it did, albeit with the expected extra sound delay) I tried increasing this in intervals of 0.005 at a time from default 0.025 to see if a smaller value could quickly be found that also did away with the issue. It seems to improve at every step, and was mostly gone at 0.04, and odd sounds were fairly rare at 0.045 so I settled on 0.05 for a few extra milliseconds of cushion. Doubling the buffer size seems to have more or less completely done away with the problem.

Considering no other Source engine titles seem to exhibit this problem on my machine, it might behoove someone to have a look through the sound code if any of it was touched and see if something might have been changed that could be responsible for potential buffer starvation that doesn't seem to occur at any time in other titles. Something that might not be causing buffer starvation on the devs' machines, or indeed most people's machines, but that might be causing some extra processing time that *could* lead to buffer starvation. There may have been something added/changed that causes things to take something on the order of 10 ms longer that might go unnoticed on some machines, but on machines similar to mine will cause an unexplained sound issue such as this.

In order to troubleshoot while working on it you can obviously reduce snd_mixahead below the default of 0.025 and you should begin to see the same symptom as I do at 0.025, as it does seem to simply be a buffer size issue. And obviously reducing the buffer size will simulate a machine with buffer starvation issues. At any rate, some profiling of any sound code changes should lead to a culprit, unless, of course, there were not any changes to the sound code.