Horrible sound quality!

[کilversurfer♒]

It's unplayable! The settings don't offer much help either! Have you guys ever gave it a go recently ? I don't recall playing half life with such horrible sound quality. It hurts my ears :(

[RockoDSS]

Mine had no trouble. check your plugs, maybe your motherboard or sound card if one is broken

[[A]zul]

It's mostly the scientists voices and the echoes that kill my ears. I'll look for plugins and drivers, hope that will fix it.
Thanks!

[MrMcSwifty]

The sound quality was indeed changed for the worse a few updates back. Lower quality sound, no surround/positional audio, no EAX effects. In fact, the removal of Creative EAX support was what sent me back to the WON version of the game. Just can't deal with the utterly horrible reverb effects and lack of positional audio with the software sound in the Steam version.

[The Traveler]

I just start the game again and yes the sound weak. Feels mono 8 bit 22 or more like 11 KHz quality. :( Even my fancy soundcard can't fix this. I guess I play the Source version. Weird the OP and BS has EAX and A3D support.

[Sharp Income]

Poop. This sucks! I just started playing CSCZ again after over a year and find out no more surround sound. WTF!? How am I supposed to know if someone is behind me or in front of me? LAME!

So now all my goldsource games have no surround sound anymore?? All the games I mod and make levels for because I enjoy them more than the source games.... no more :(

[The Boque]

hmmmmm.. I played HL1 today and i didnt saw any changes, expect some short ( half a second) sounds loop Ex: * we need tototo get out of here*

[کilversurfer♒]

Only Blue Shift and Opposing force didn't suffer any changes..

[The Boque]

Originally posted by کilversurfer♒:

Only Blue Shift and Opposing force didn't suffer any changes..

ill play one of those and see if it differ from hl1

[SoF{GR}]

*BUMP* is there any way we can get the good old audio renderer ? i started played some SP mods recently and it's not enjoyable at all, the soundscape is so weird, especially during three way battles ( player vs marines vs aliens )

I'll try playing opposing force and blue shift mods instead, too bad there are not many of them out there :(

[satsun]

I booted HL1 today and noticed that surround sound was no longer working.

Looks like they majorly fudged the sound in an update:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/70/discussions/0/828934913113943429

I don't think that Valve really cares much for sound considering how harsh (compressed) everything sounds in their games. Someone probably implements changes at their rolley-movey desk, they test with their headphones and as long as there is sound then it's all good.

Now I'm just shooting my mouth off here, but the poor sound guy, with his nice little studio room, creates the audio with his large 9 speaker setup and expensive production equipment, and then Valve uses some antiquated audio middleware to make the audio work in their games, which completely butcher the dynamic range of the audio. In a world where everyone is using Wwise and FMOD, which are both awesome, Valve is using... Miles Sound System. Valve probably bought the most cost-effective license for MSS and would hate to spend a penny more on something like FMOD.

I know that HL1 was made in the days of 22kHz audio so quality isn't going to be just super, but even newer games like TF2 and Portal 2 have harsh audio. The audio is just not... "smooth" and punchy sounding, it's like audio you hear from dry-rotted paper speakers in an old car.

Anyway, they basically did the same thing to their Linux ports of Source games. Their Source engine games still have surround sound in Windows, but last time I played them in Linux they were limited to stereo. Seems like they went full ♥♥♥♥♥♥ with Half-Life 1. WHO DOES THAT!?