This video is about a REALLY important subject. Hearing loss and tinnitus are serious things.
No matter how many extra frags you think loud volumes are gaining you now, I doubt it will
be worth irreversible hearing loss later in your life, or an endless ringing in your ears
forever more. I am no expert on the matter, but I feel comfortable
ENOUGH to talk about the stuff in this video. I hope to raise awareness to the problems
and what can be done about them. Hopefully somebody more knowledgeable will come along
to provide more information later on. A few videos ago I established that, to hear
things better in Counter-Strike, you shouldn’t turn your volume up. Because you’ll go deaf.
But there’s something else you could try. COMPRESSION!
No, not the winzip kind of compression. I’m talking about Dynamic Range Compression.
No, not High Dynamic Range. It’s best I show you an example.
Here’s a song I made, represented in audio waves. There’s a reason I’ve kept it as
quiet as it is, which you’ll soon discover. For if I compress it, it makes the quieter
bits of the song louder, transforming it into THIS.
And if I do it again several times… THIS. With enough compression, the whole song will
become the ‘same volume’, which as you can hear is really over the top and you don’t
want that because it’s deafeningly loud… even though what you’re hearing here is
10 dB quieter than my voice… which means it should sound half as loud. But it still
sounds loud, doesn’t it. That’s the power of compression!
But while it’s gotten LOUDER, the maximum volume for the song hasn’t increased. It’s
just that the whole song is now at that maximum volume, instead of only hitting it for a couple
of brief moments. You’re effectively getting more sound from the same thing.
It’s actually been a controversial topic in music, known as the ‘Loudness War’.
If you compare a song first released in the 80’s to a more modern re-release, the chances
are the newer one will sound a hellollololot louder. In a way this is a good thing, since
you won’t have to keep turning the volume up and down depending on which track is playing,
or even which BIT of a track is playing. So in a way, it makes sense for all newer songs
to be compressed to a certain extent. But the down-side is that it all being equally
loud could detract from a song’s artistic… value. Should the build-up be the same volume
as the crescendo? Does it make sense? DO YOU CARE?!
And for extreme examples of compression you need look no further than adverts and clickbait
youtubers, which have always ramped it up to be as loud and obnoxious sounding as possible.
But what’s this got to do with Counter-Strike? Imagine you want to hear footsteps. Instead
of turning the volume up and potentially damaging your hearing, you could instead turn DOWN
your volume, enable compression, and quieter sounds will still sound louder and easier
to hear! Here’s an example with no compression.
Making the game loud enough to hear the footsteps makes the gunshots and voices TOO loud. Now,
let’s enable compression. This compression is over the top, but it demonstrates
what the effect can do. Even though I turned the volume down a bit for this one, footsteps
still sound louder than before, but voices and gunshots are nowhere near as unpleasant
on your ears. They’re still not nice, and they still drown out quieter sounds. But once
they’ve stopped, you’re back to hearing the quiet sounds in almost super-human clarity
again. Short of removing gunshots and voices completely, you can’t get much better than
this. This sounds great, doesn’t it. But there’s
a dark-side to compression. I’m a big believer in habit, reflex and
routine. And since compression would constantly alter the volume of things, I’d fear it
would make it harder to pinpoint where sounds are coming from. If you’re like me, you’re
USED to what footsteps at short a sound like. You use the direction and volume to pinpoint
the location. But if you compressed the volume, distant footsteps would end up being a similar
volume to closer ones. The volume of the sound would no longer give you information, meaning
you’d have to rely solely on the direction and your knowledge of the map.
I don’t know how much of a problem this would be. I’d imagine it would be a bit
of one. But then again, there is a constant in Counter-Strike: and those are the ambient
sounds. Every bit of a map has a soundscape, which
is something like THIS. In the past, these sounds used to be louder,
but in recent times these have been kept rather quiet relative to the other game sounds, probably
because they realised players would want to be able to hear footsteps and stuff. But rather
than removing background sounds entirely, I think having them constantly and quietly
droning on has a benefit. Because while compression will fight to keep
everything as loud as possible, having ambient sounds present will help put others into perspective.
Like, if footsteps are a similar volume to the background sound, even with compression,
you’ll know that they’re a long way off because they’ll sound about the same volume
as the background sounds. With compression, ambient sounds actually help you to determine
the volume of other sounds! I mentioned voices earlier. Communication
is important in Counter-Strike. Here’s an example of what an average round might sound
like. We lost that round. But that’s besides the
point! Unlike my team, I suspect that most people use an external program like Discord
which they use to communicate with teammates. This could be dangerous.
Like you know how you listen to music through earbuds when you’re walking down the street?
If there’s loud traffic, you turn your music’s volume up so that you can still hear it. It’s
all too easy to forget how loud it is until the next time you turn your mp3 player on
and are almost deafened by the volume. Were you really listening to it at that volume?
Yes. Yes you were. You just didn’t realise it at the time. Plus your ears close up after
a while but that’s something I’m not going to cover.
I imagine team chat on discord is similar to the traffic phenomenon. You want to be
able to hear your teammates over the sound of the game, so turn the sound of discord
up louder than the game itself. Which again, won’t be good for your hearing.
The solution to this would be compression. But there’s also another feature that could
help, known as AUTO-DUCKING, which lets you prioritise the volume of some sounds over
others. Let’s listen to an example. At the moment
I am talking and you can hear me clearly. But if I play ‘music’ at the same time,
you’ll now struggle to hear what I’m saying. Auto-ducking makes the music quieter whenever
I’m talking, returning to normal volume whenever there’s a pause. I could probably
have configured it to be less abrupt than this but oh well. Auto-ducking lets you keep
your game and chat program at the same volume and you’ll still be able to hear both.
Turns out that Discord has a setting for this, to give it priority over whatever game you’re
playing while using it. You’ll want to slide this Attenuation slider up. The more you do
this, the quieter your game will become whenever somebody’s talking to you on Discord. The
down-side is that somebody endlessly breathing into their mic on discord will silence your
game. The plus-side is that you’ll be able to hear more clearly for the rest of your
life than if you had just turned Discord up louder than the game in the first place.
Of course, Valve could do things on their end to the sounds themselves, adjusting the
footsteps to remain louder further away, dropping off into silence more suddenly. All of these
things would help to reduce the reliance on loud volumes.
I never expect a response from Valve but would love to know what they think of this topic
and how it has influenced the new gun and audio features they’ve been adding to Counter
Strike in these past few years. For now, if you want to game with audio compression
enabled, whether you can or not totally depends on what kind of sound drivers and software
you have. For ME, I can go to sound settings, device properties, enhancements, and have
an option called ‘Loudness Equalisation.’. Which, you guessed it, is compression.
And a last word of warning: all else being equal, enabling compression and keeping your
volume the same as you had it before will make the average sound ‘louder’, which
I have no doubt will be worse for your ears. Compression should be used in conjunction
with LOWER volumes coming out of your speakers. The quieter sounds can still be heard, the
loudest parts will no longer deafen you and your ears will thank you in the long-term.
You can tell when it’s on because if the game’s been quiet for a while, the background
sounds will get louder and you’ll start worrying that gunshots will be deafening.
But of course, they won’t be. That’s the power of compression, folks.
I have several other videos on sound in games. Here was my first video talking about how
Counter-Strike’s sound could be improved. Here’s a video demonstrating CS:GO’s surround
sound. And here’s one on their occlusion tech,
which was introduced later.