Insurgency Audio Guide for SoundBlaster X-Fi & Headphones

An extensive audio guide for Insurgency players on Windows with a Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi soundcard and (stereo) headphones that want the best possible hardware accelerated surround sound in-game.

Introduction

This guide will show you how to optimize and enhance the audio in Insurgency using Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi features like ALchemy, EAX, CMSS-3D Headphone, hardware acceleration, CVars and a good pair of (stereo) headphones.

Headphones give by far the best and most immersive surround sound experience so this guide is completely focusing on just that. All areas that relate to this setup will be covered.

As a nice side-effect game performance should also improve a bit (in theory) because all of Insurgency's audio processing will be handled by the SoundBlaster X-Fi soundcard, the CPU no longer needs to do this.

Prerequisites

• Windows 7 or higher
  
• Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi (EMU20K1) soundcard with drivers & apps* installed and working
  
• using (stereo) Headphones when playing Insurgency

*: these Creative apps/drivers are needed: ALchemy, Console Launcher, OpenAL

TL;DR? In a hurry? No problem, just follow the instructions of the sections marked with ♫. You can skip the rest!

Okay, let's start ...

♫ Windows Sound settings

We are going to configure Windows for 5.1 Surround speakers. Yes, even if we really will be using Headphones in-game.

Go to Control Panel | Hardware and Sound | Sound | Playback tab
select your playback device and click Configure

set speakers to 5.1 Surround, click Next 3 times (speakers are selected) and Finish

Other sound settings:

Go to Playback tab (see above)
select your playback device and click Properties | Sound Blaster tab
make sure the checkbox for Disable Sound Blaster enhancements is empty

Go to Advanced tab (right next to Sound Blaster tab)
set Default Sound Format to: 24 bit, 44100 or 48000 Hz (Studio Quality)

Done.

Insurgency's audio resolution is 16 bit with a sample rate of 44100 Hz

♫ Creative ALchemy settings

In this section we are going to add Insurgency to Creative ALchemy so that we can have hardware accelerated audio back in the game.

Start Creative ALchemy and click the Add button, use the following settings:

Game Title: Insurgency (on Steam)
Use Game Path: <drive>:\Valve\Steam\SteamApps\common\Insurgency2
Buffers: 4
Duration: 10
Maximum voicecount: 128
Disable Direct Music: leave empty

Replace <drive> with the drive letter where Insurgency is installed on your PC,
for example: D:\Valve\Steam\SteamApps\common\Insurgency2

When you add Insurgency it will first appear in the left column, under Installed Games. Select it and use the >> button to move the game to the right side, under ALchemy-enabled Games.

Done.

Creative ALchemy is an application that allows Sound Blaster owners to experience many DirectSound3D games as game developers have intended: with full hardware accelerated 3D Audio and EAX support (in Windows Vista™ and higher). This is achieved by translating DirectSound3D into OpenAL calls.

♫ Creative Console Launcher settings

This section shows how to use Creative Console Launcher to configure the X-Fi soundcard for gaming, the most important settings here are CMSS-3D Headphone and setting speakers to Headphones.

Start Creative Console Launcher and switch the X-Fi soundcard to Game Mode

X-Fi CMSS-3D: Enable
MacroFX: Auto (or On)
ElevationFilter: Auto (or On)

X-Fi Crystalizer:
Disable

EQ: (Equalizer)
Disable or set to personal preference

Mixer:
SVM: disable (leave empty!)
Enable EAX Effects, 0.0dB
Mic Environment FX: 0% (but can be set to personal preference)

Speakers:
Headphones

Bass:
leave disabled, if you want more bass it's better to use the EQ instead.

Done.

MacroFX and ElevationFilter do not seem to have much of an effect (if any at all) in Insurgency, but they may have in other games so best is to leave them on Auto.

If you want to know what each option exactly does you can visit this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster_X-Fi

♫ Insurgency Audio settings

Start Insurgency, go to Settings | Audio

Set Speaker Configuration to: 5.1 speakers
Set Sound Quality to: High
Voice Radio Filter: Enabled (this gives a realistic and cool radio comms effect)

Done.

Insurgency does not have an option to select 7.1 speakers

♫ Audio-related Console Variables

Console Variables (CVars) are a way to further customize many different game settings:

Copy & Paste the following CVars in a file named autoexec.cfg so they will be set automatically when Insurgency is started. The default location of this file is: <drive>:\Valve\Steam\SteamApps\common\Insurgency2\cfg\autoexec.cfg

If you do not have an autoexec.cfg yet just create it, it's a normal text file with extension .cfg, and save it in the location shown above.

Several of these CVars are set to their default values and are shown here for completeness.

snd_legacy_surround 1 		     // use legacy directsound audio calls
snd_mix_async 1                      // parallel sound processing for multicore cpus
snd_async_fullyasync 0               // no fully async sound (it doesn't play until data arrives)
snd_mixahead 0.10 	             // audio buffer mix ahead time in ms (default=0.10)
snd_mix_optimization 1 	             // Turn on optimization for mixing (default=1)
snd_dsp_optimization 1 	             // Turn on optimization for DSP effects (default=1)
snd_mix_soundchar_enabled 1          // Turn on sound char for mixing (default=1)
snd_obstruction_enable 1 	     // Turn on audio-occlusion (see note below)
dsp_enhance_stereo 1 		     // use richer and more atmospheric stereo effects
bind F3 to snd_restart               // pressing F3 in-game will restart the sound system
host_writeconfig                     // overwrite conflicting config.cfg - must be the last line!

Done.

Please note that at the time of creating this guide, end of November 2015, audio-occlusion was still in development, so this feature might be a little rough around the edges but it does already sound pretty decent so try using it and see if you like it.

More info about audio-occlusion here: https://trello.com/c/Dt9wGsKD/2-audio-occlusion

Update March 31st, 2016:

Unfortunately NWI has decided to refocus their efforts on getting proper audio occlusion into their NEXT game on UE4, Insurgency: Sandstorm. The current version of audio occlusion in Insurgency is not to the quality where they want it enabled by default.

Configuration Check

In this section you will find information that can help you check and verify if the new sound setup is configured and working as expected.

If you have configured everything correctly you will see the following message (in red font) somewhere in the console after starting Insurgency. When you restart the sound system on demand by pressing F3 the message shows up as well:

3d surround sound initialization successful

When you type the command soundinfo in the console you will see the following info.
Don't worry about the "Channels: 1" message, that's either intended or a bug because the improved surround sound will be clearly present:

Sound Device:   5 Channel Surround
  Channels:     1
  Samples:      8192
  Bits/Sample:  16
  Rate:         44100

ALchemy has placed two files in the Insurgency2 directory: dsound.dll and dsound.ini
it needs these files to do its magic. The file dsound.ini contains ALchemy's settings for Insurgency that you have entered earlier.

Also from now on when you play Insurgency a third file named dsoundlog.txt will be created in directory <drive>:\Valve\Steam\SteamApps\common\Insurgency2\

The contents of the dsoundlog.txt file should normally look similar to this:

Logging Time : 28/11/2015 at 3:13:24

Loaded D:\Valve\Steam\steamapps\common\insurgency2\dsound.ini

Using Native OpenAL Renderer
DirectSoundCaptureCreate - Passing to real dsound.dll
DirectSoundCaptureCreate - Passing to real dsound.dll
DirectSoundCaptureCreate - Passing to real dsound.dll

Workshop Sound Mods

This is actually a bit beyond the scope of the guide, that's why I will only mention this one Insurgency sound mod briefly, it's called the Realistic Supersonic Bullet Cracks mod and it makes the sound of bullets whizzing by so badass that you will most likely faint and fall out of your chair when it happens! :) Go subscribe to it and hear it for yourself in-game.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=342886517
Remember, when the sound in-game is distorted just press F3 once to re-initialize the sound system, that should solve most problems with sound mods.

Note: sound mods do not work on sv_pure servers!

Closing Notes

I hope this guide was useful and that it helps you experience truly immersive hardware accelerated surround sound in Insurgency.

>>>Please leave a rating. Thank you.<<<

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions leave them below in the comment section and I'll get back to you when needed.

Special thanks to WildCat for the inspiration to create this guide, my first! 

[Yamanashi]

Are there anymore audio cfg commands that would make the experience in this game better?

[gothmoneyrecords]

imo u dont need headphones in THIS game becouse u cant hear anything

[Valérian]

@Zomba: thanks for letting me know. You are right, the 8 feb. 2017 Insurgency update comes with BattlEye Anti-cheat software and that prevents dsound.dll (which is part of Alchemy and perfectly legit) to be loaded into memory. I don't know how to work around this without help of BattlEye so yeah, removing Insurgency from Alchemy works but we will no longer have HW-accelerated audio in-game. :( If I have more info I'll update this.

[Zomba]

The Feb 8th update cause massive audio studdering. I turned off alchemy and it works again... i guess it doesnt work anymore

[» RΔD1C4L «]

No problem and I'm using D3DGear recording software.

[Valérian]

= RAD1C4L =, thanks for sharing, I have not heard about that before but I am still on Win7. What program are you using for recording?

[» RΔD1C4L «]

P.S. I just noticed that my recording software gets its audio recording fucked up when I used the alchemy settings from your post while being on Windows 10, so I deleted that tweak and audio recording works fine after that, so keep all that in mind guys.

[» RΔD1C4L «]

As a user of a good old X-Fi titanium soundcard, I thank you! I really did not have any clue of this issue, but with this improvements I can't wait to hear the enhancement in the sound deparment.

[Valérian]

@ spacefrog: too bad it does not work for you, it should work fine though if you have the right hardware and follow the guide, the out-of-head experience is great with CMSS-3D and EAX can be turned off completely if you really dislike that effect (usually it should be set to 0.0dB). You could also test with "snd_obstruction_enable" 1 or 0 (on or off). I hear absolutely no sounds overlapping when setting audio to 5.1 ... that's really strange.

[cr!ptal]

Looked promising at first, I switched back to "basic" headphones sound after test.
First, I really dont like EAX effect, it is like playing in a church with a lot of echo, personnaly I don't like it. I started with switching it off.
Second, the 5.1 setting in audio config in Insurgency caused sounds overlapping, strange mixes (I configured all the SB settings also first).
Anyway, thanks for sharing :)