Close your eyes and click your fingers around your head and notice how precisely you can
pinpoint where it’s coming from. You hear that? That’s what CS:GO is missing.
It’s no secret that CS:GO has bad directional sound. No number of new gun sounds will change
this, it requires a rework of the sound engine. A bit of a disclaimer, I’m far from an expert
on this topic, but I’ve got a load of cool examples I really want to share with you.
Just treat this as an entertaining video and walk away from it knowing that CS:GO’s directional
sound leaves a lot to be desired. Firstly, for surround sound there’s no need
for us to have 5, 7 or 360 speakers around us. We have two ears. With the correct implementation,
a stereo headset can simulate surround sound, based on the miniscule delays and echoes between
our ears that your brain uses to pinpoint where sounds are coming from.
For real world recordings it’s simple: you use two microphones, one placed in either
ear of a model human head. When equipped with properly designed ears, it accurately simulates
how yours work and there are some cool examples of this in action that you can listen to RIGHT
NOW with headphones on. Pretty cool- but this can also be simulated in the virtual environments
of games. There are some prototype sound engines that
accurately simulate it, like this Gsound demonstration from 2011, and more recently AMD’s Trueaudio
and Nvidia’s VRworks audio. So far none of these have really made their way into many
proper games. Listening to these tech demos, they make it out to be intensive stuff that
requires a powerful graphics card. Well… maybe their examples do. But convincing surround
sound in games has been around for decades. In fact, long before we had convincing graphics
we had realistic audio. There was a company called Aureal that made 3D audio for games
in the 90’s. Here’s a tech demo. It’s perhaps one of the weirdest mixes of old and
new tech you’ll ever see. Sounds muffle as they go behind walls, you
can accurately pinpoint where the sounds are coming from. It’s fascinating stuff, made
all the more eerie by low quality sound effects and 90’s textureless graphics.
There are examples of this technology in numerous old games, including Thief, Quake and perhaps
most upsettingly… Half Life 1, as show in this Half Life 3! Dimensional sound demonstration.
So WHAT HAPPENED? Well, according to Wikipedia, Creative sued
them for patent infringement, lost, but the cost of the lawsuits bankrupted Aureal who
were then bought by Creative. They then did nothing with the technology and pushed their
own 5.1 surround sound speaker setups for a number of years. It’s really sad when
you think about it. Maybe this is why surround sound has sucked since then.
So clearly, our computers are capable of decent surround sound. It’s just red tape, legal
battles and developers not caring much that stops it from making its way into our games.
But it would be nice to be able to hear where enemies are coming from, not just from around
us but from above and below as well. So until CS:GO’s sound engine can be upgraded, what
can we do? Firstly, open-backed headsets are meant to
be better for directional sound, giving the impression that sounds are coming from around
you rather than from inside your head. But don’t just take my word for it! Listen to
this video from Linus, where he talks about this stuff. Ironically this video’s sound
will only play out of your right speaker. Any way, the illusion of sound coming from
around you is known as the headset’s ‘soundstage’. It’s the reason that I got the Audiotechnica
AD700’s after I sat on and broke my old Sennheisers, since they’re supposed to have
a very large sound stage. Just don’t try to listen to open-backed headsets in public
places because you won’t hear much and you’ll annoy everyone around you. But even these
aren’t going to fix CS:GO’s sound. Things can largely be helped by intelligent
level design. Take Nuke, for example, which is a perfect
example of what not to do. Having most of the combat play out on top of itself makes
directional sound very important and the Source version in particular has been criticised
because of this. They took steps to improve it by adding metal to the lower bombsite to
help players to distinguish between footsteps. Since then they’ve revamped the map entirely
and I’m sure that thought was put into deciding which surfaces should have which sort of material.
But it’s still not a proper solution. 1.6 players will swear that it didn’t used to
be a problem and that CS:GO’s sound system has made it a lot worse.
And lastly you could try using some third party software to simulate surround sound.
A while ago I posted a controversial video on Razer’s surround sound software. I was
accused of being a sellout and all that, but I can assure you that I saw no sweet, sweet
money from Razer. I was just doing my best to try and help you guys. Honest. And still
am. The basic version is still up for download and if you have a Razer product it will give
you a better version for free. Some complain that it delays the audio and all that, but
I’d still say it’s worth a try since it might improve things for you if CS:GO’s
limited surround sound support is really annoying you.
One day, CS:GO might get better surround sound. But how much better do we want? Is it possible
for sounds to become TOO realistic? I’d argue that Arma 3, a game that prides
itself in being as realistic as possible, goes too far. It’s cool that guns sound
different in enclosed spaces -something Half Life 1 also did, by the way- but in this example
you can even see that it even models the speed of sound, playing the explosion long after
you see it happening. Would this sort of delay help CS:GO? Or is it a little bit too far
for a game that doesn’t even model bullet physics?
And that weird 90’s A3D example bounces sounds off of walls, which, when combined
with muffling stuff behind walls, can make it sound like sounds are coming from the opposite
direction than they actually are. This is realistic- but do we want this in CS:GO?
Or would it be enough to just have good directional sound that drops off as it gets further away?
This sounds simple enough, but SOME games still don’t even manage this properly.