Normally I race with headphones to avoid annoying my family , but yesterday I used my 5.1 speaker setup (yes, I was alone in the house ). Having surround sound with 6 speakers is so much better than headphones, it really immerses you more. To be able to hear cars behind / beside you is awesome. But I found a bug in the surround sounds of Raceroom: Car: Honda Civic, Audi DTM 2013 Track: Zandvoort When another car is passing me from the right, no sound of that car is heard on the rear speakers. When he's passing me from the left, the car is heard. The rear right speaker does not sound other car sounds, it does produce all other sounds. And a a second thing: in general R3E only sounds a 'whoosh' kind of sound when a car passes by, to my opinion I should be able to hear it's engine too, not just a whoosh.
What you describes with left and right speakers doesn't happen for me here but I'm wondering if this happens with every cars or only the Civic (which one?), or were you driving the Audi DTM 2013? Also, if you can't hear the engine sound when a car passes by means that your install might have a problem. You should definitely be able to hear the engine, and louder than the road/wind sound (whoosh). I'm guessing you configured the game in 5.1 in the menu and in your soundcard options aswell, and that you checked it? It might be interesting to check the integrity of your game files through Steam, and see if that sloves your issues.
Just tested it again: Honda Civic (WTCC 2013) on Hockenheim, the rear right speaker does not play the sound of cars passing me from the rear right. I can only hear the car in the front right speaker when the car has passed me. Other sounds are heard from all speakers, so including the rear right speaker. When a car pass me from the rear left the other car sounds are heard in the rear left speaker. Also the engine from a passing car is there, but is very faint, it should be louder to my opinion. But it is never heard from the rear right speaker, not even the 'whoosh'. I have installed the latest patch of the game and did an integrity check (no problems found). My soundcard and the game is setup as 5.1 and did a sound test in Windows (speakers are setup correctly). I did reset all of my settings, that did not help.
Is there maybe an issue with some sound samples or the sound system at all in 5.1 after the last update? I first thought that my soundcard is going to fail because I had very distorted 5.1 sounds esp. with the Grp5 Classic cars. But then I did some tests with other sound stuff (outside R3E) and everything is well. Also when running the GT Master 2014 or the DTM 2015 everything seems to be o.k. in stereo over headphones as well as in 5.1 through my Logitech speakers. But the Grp5 cars sound (cockpit view) ist still crippled and gets worse the longer the session advances. Worst scenario is a racing situation when you overtake some other cars or them yours. I even tuned some sliders in the audio settings down below 50% but this crippled and distorted 5.1 sounds remains. My sound system is a Asus Xonar Xense running on Win 7 / 64bit all together with a medium class Logiotech 5.1 speaker system.
Now , that's interesting, you're not the first one who reports distortion issues. Another guy on the Race Department forum described the same kind of distorted sounds in 5.1 mode aswell, a few months ago. Unfortunately, we've yet to reproduce it on our rigs here, so it's a bit hard to address it if we can't hear the problem. May I ask you to upload a video of the distorted sounds so I can at least figure out what is the origin of the issue? I can only guess it's a weird combination of soundcard and motherboard causing it, otherwise many people would report the same issue.
I'll try to make a video for you. The 1st video I did with shadowplay did not reproduce that effect because shadowplay records in stereo, so I have to try it otherwise. The soundcard shouldn't be the problem, not because it had a highend price, but it works very well with all my other (racing) games in stereo as well as in 5.1 surround..
The soundcard itself can't be the issue, but soundcards and motherboard, chipsets etc, all this combined can create all kind of problems that we can't even imagine. I think Fraps can record in 5.1
Thanks. I'll check this out. Besides: I did some tests today, removed the Asus Xonar Xense and activated the onboard Realtek ALC 898. It showed the same results. Now I see three main possibilities: - my Logitech 5.1 system is broken - something onboard happens that disturbs the sound - there is something odd going on with the R3E sound system as soon as I switch from Stereo to 5.1
Let's say the problem is in the R3E sound system, we still need to be able to reproduce it in the studio, or we might never be able to fix it. I tried again yesterday and there was nothing wrong with the channel volumes or the sound quality, but at least 2 players including you got the same issues (and potentially more people) , so it must be something very hard to narrow.
@LTC Mike I want to reproduce it on my rig, but I have two little questions that may help me to reproduce the problem: How is your Soundcard connected to the Soundsystem? With those three jack-plugs or with SPDIF (Coaxial/Optical)? And it seems that only Gr5 is effected - is it a special Car that you use there or is it with all Gr5-Cars?
Insert Coin said that the problem occured with the Honda WTCC 2013, so it's not only the Group 5 (which would make things simpler)
hehe, thats for sure... I thought that are two different Problems as Insert Coin describes missing Sounds in some channels and LTC Mike discribes distorted Sounds in Gr5.
Yea, right, I mixed up the issues, sorry. To me, Insert Coin issues can only be caused by either a wrong installation/file corruption of the game, or an hardware issue or PC drivers etc. The fact that he doesn't hear the engine when a car passes by clearly sounds like a corrupted/faulty install, the channel volume problem is most likely an additional consequence of the same corruption issue.
@m.bohlken : it's connected via the 3 3.5mm jacks yes it seems that it's worst with the Grp.5 Zakspeed Ford the new DTM2015 and the ADAC GT Masters seem to be not as bad, but sounds seem a little muffled I also tried different sound settings with 5.1 and 7.1 (the two side speakers de-activated in the Windows sound configuration) - each similar when testing in Asus sound mixer, Windows sound configuration and R3E settings and it didn't matter. The only thing, that makes a difference is when I switch to stereo in the game options. Now I will try to make a video with fraps this evening to provide you with some material to check.
Sorry for the delay - I had a lot of things to do and not much time for playing/testing R3E. But today I did a short video clip with Bandicam in full resolution with my normal settings. Playing this I could clearly reproduce the distorted and noisy sound - if no one else could hear it on his systerm then maybe my soundcard has some bug with R3E. Where or whom should I provide a link to the specific Onedrive folder (file with 5 min. video and separate audio is over 2.6 GB)? My Asus Xonar audio center settings are also provided as screenshots in this folder.
Done - you should have received the link to my onedrive folder with the corresponding files. Hope I could provide some help with this.
1) Were there any changes to the audio in the last major update? 2) Is there a current fix available? I too am having sound issues, since the last major update. I tested 7.1 surround settings and 5.1 surround settings. Sound is extremely distorted. Driving over curbs Hitting harsh bumps Certain engines In GTO class Basically, the only car I hear is the Audi. The closer the Audi is, the lower the car volume. The 300zx is almost imperceptible (or it could be another Audi). I do not hear the Mustang or the 300zx when I am door handle to door handle. I hear the Audi when it is next to me, but the volume is low. Also, there doesn't seem to be audio for light to moderate rear impacts to my car. My car just suddenly spins and when I view the replay, I see that I was hit from behind. I can clearly hear the impact if I hit a car in front of me though, even a slight bump. I had to turn down the audio settings due to the distortion. To give you an idea of what my current volume levels are in R3E and windows........ R3E overall volume 100% my engine volume 75% Opponents cars 100% Road noise 67% Gear whine 75% Effects volume 75% Due to the distortion and the ringing in the ears it causes, Windows volume is now set to "6" out of a possible 100 (under speaker volume properties). Previously, I used "27". I do not have this issue with other racing sims, games, or videos. -------------------- Items done to fix the issue Tried 3 different versions of logitechs audio drivers but using the most current. verified the integrity of the game files through steam ------------------------- Realtek onboard Audio for my Asus motherboard Logitech USB gaming headsets Logitech gaming software
Hmm... Tested out the GTO class using the Ford at Red Bull Ring and didnt notice any weird distortion or any other sound issues in 5.1. I made sure to go over kerbs and drive next to the other cars. My first thought was to have you verify your game cache on Steam, but you already did that My next thought would be to put those audio settings back to default, as I know the recommended percentages have changed in the past ~6 months or so with certain patches that changed the overall sound volume and mix of sound. To do this, go to My Documents/my games/SimBin/R3E/User Data.. and look for the file titled "audio_options.xml." Deleting this file will lose your saved audio settings in game, so you could simply rename it as "audio_options_custom.xml" or something like that so you know those are your settings and can restore them later. Once doing that, the game should create a new file with the default settings. As seen here: Try that and see if the problems persist. I can try to check this out again later on and see if the problem is on a different track. For my own testing purposes, what track did you notice these problems on?
This problem is really annoying though . We never experienced it here and it seems to affect a very limited number of persons (or we would read many more reports about it, and from beta testers too). Even weirder, why only certain cars and not all of them ? Anyway, I can't think about anything that could explain those issues, audio wise at least, especially when the issue didn't happen internally. This seems to be a very obvious problem so we would have detected it immediately. Code wise, I can't think of anything that would affect some specific vehicles only. 3D? There's very few links between the 3D model and its sound except the locators. Maybe we could have a look and see but how can we fix it if the issue doesn't happen here? And this one is a new issue but it could very well be linked to the initial audio problem : "Also, there doesn't seem to be audio for light to moderate rear impacts to my car. My car just suddenly spins and when I view the replay, I see that I was hit from behind. I can clearly hear the impact if I hit a car in front of me though, even a slight bump."