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ubikutz's avatar
11 years ago

Need For Speed has little to no low frequency content in game effects or music

Hi, I am running Need For Speed with the latest patched on my PS4.
My PS4 is connected via optical out to a pair of 2.1 speakers (2 satellites and subwoofer).
If i listen to general music on my PS4, i get a lot of bass from the subwoofer and bass-heavy music sounds just great.

In Need For Speed, both the in-game music and in-game sound effect have very little low end presence.
My subwoofer is doing almost nothing at all. In-game bass-heavy music sounds very dry with no bass.

It seems to me that somewhere in the audio chain, low frequency content is lost, maybe during the down-mixing to 2.0, maybe somewhere else.
Bottom line, the in-game sound sounds very "hallow" and not fun at all.
I've tried both the "Home Cinema" and "Headphones" sound options and both are a bit dry compared to standalone music playing sounds like.

13 Replies

  • ubikutz's avatar
    ubikutz
    11 years ago

    Glad i’m not the only one with this issue :-)

    Yes the game sound is overall a bit low compared with other content - not sure why this is happening; it can get quite loud if you turn the volume all the way up, but even with loudness comes comparatively little presence and impact.
    Without the enchanced perception that low frequency effects brings to the table, the sound is just agressive and does not seem “full”.

    For example, one of the things that caught my attention is with the car engine noise.

    When starting the car from a complete halt, there is, during the initial acceleration phase, a bit of subwoofer action which makes the start seems a bit more real.
    However, once the car is in motion, the subwoofer stops and does nothing at all.
    So basically you’re driving with a sports car with the engine screaming at 8000rpm, yet there is no subwoofer output, hence you feel no vibration, no impact in the game - It feels a bit fake.

    There may be many reasons for this - hopefully the tech team will look a bit into this. I’m thinking … :
    - maybe it’s related to the downmixing… maybe NFS uses a multichannel 5.1/7.1 audio track in the game engine and when the PS4 downmixes to 2.0 to output via optical it completly drops the .1 LFE channel that contains the low frequency information or it messes the volumes of the individual channels being downmixed
    - maybe the original audio resources contain the full spectrum of information, but maybe somewhere during processing / mixing / compressing the low frequency information got lost along the way?

    ….

  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    11 years ago

    Definitely, the volume doesn't seem "full" and impactful as other games. I'm sure it's the subwoofer now, maybe if someone can test it on different outputs and try it on 5.1 ch see how it differs.

  • ubikutz's avatar
    ubikutz
    11 years ago
    Hi Tom!

    Any feedback on this from the team?
    Were you able to reproduce this issue?

    Thanks!

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