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Any word on the sound quality?

Harald BHarald B
edited November 2007 in Sam & Max
Last season, (perceived) bad audio compression was a source of much debate. IIRC, there would be a kind of tool redesign that would make it easier to swap out audio files for higher quality ones (and/or different language ones, which was an important reason for the redesign). So, what's the status on this?
Will season two have higher quality sound than season one? Will there be separate downloads that increase audio quality?

Comments

  • JakeJake Telltale Alumni
    edited November 2007
    Harald B wrote: »
    Will season two have higher quality sound than season one? Will there be separate downloads that increase audio quality?


    Nope, and nope. Sorry :(
  • Guybrush ThreepwoodGuybrush Threepwood
    edited November 2007
    No?! Oh man...
  • Harald BHarald B
    edited November 2007
    Aww... Oh well, luckily for me, I only barely noticed it last season.
  • CaptainXaxCaptainXax
    edited November 2007
    The dialogue is amazing. More than makes up for Sybil's 'S' sounds. But the kick-awesome music makes you forget about it too.
  • fhqwhgadsfhqwhgads
    edited November 2007
    I have to admit, after upgrading my source of sound and replaying Season 1, I, for the first time, noticed (prominently) the lack of sound quality. (If you remember, I was one of the few who defended Telltale's decision).

    I'd lie if I'd say it did not bother me. But as CaptainXax said, the music quality is top notch, and the dialog more than make up for it!
  • jared25jared25
    edited November 2007
    Max: It's a metaphor!
    Sam: You don't even know what that means!
    Max: Yes I do! It's like a metal floor, without the L's.

    Where exactly did you get that from?
  • fhqwhgadsfhqwhgads
    edited November 2007
    If memory serves me correct
    Bright Side of the Moon: In the Blister of Tranquility if you try to walk through the metal door multiple times. I'm not sure, but I think you have to do it just after 'seeing through' the door.
  • wispwisp
    edited November 2007
    fhqwhgads wrote: »
    I have to admit, after upgrading my source of sound and replaying Season 1, I, for the first time, noticed (prominently) the lack of sound quality.

    what exactly is "source of sound" referring to?? i didn't notice any problems with sound quality so far..so what should i avoid changing?
  • BadwolfBadwolf
    edited November 2007
    Probably your speakers / graphics card. The better they are, the sharper they'll play sound so compression can be heard more easily.

    I noticed a difference when I went from the speakers built into my monitor to external speakers, but nothing that really distracted me when I wasn't looking for it.
  • YohmiYohmi
    edited November 2007
    You can hear it if you use a headphone around 60$ (and more), or if you use anything else than cheap built-in computer speakers. The sound card can change something, but today, sound cards are powerfull enough to deliver a great sound, at least for pre-amplified speakers and average quality wired headphones.
  • KrakenKraken
    edited November 2007
    Disappointing, after all the complaints, I was sure this area would be addressed with at least slightly improved quality.
  • glenfxglenfx
    edited November 2007
    have you played with the bass and tremble settings of your sound card?, if you set the tremble too high and the bass to low itll really suck.
  • NHJ BVNHJ BV
    edited November 2007
    I think someone earlier said it would be improved somewhat. Maybe I dreamed it :(
  • fhqwhgadsfhqwhgads
    edited November 2007
    wisp wrote: »
    what exactly is "source of sound" referring to?? i didn't notice any problems with sound quality so far..so what should i avoid changing?

    My Souncard is an Audigy 2, that has stayed the same. I have a set of creative 2.1 speakers where I believed the 'booming base' disguised the compression artifacts.

    I have since gotten myself a pair of Sennheiser earphones, and while the base is still VERY good and prominent, the higher frequencies are also much more descernable. I believe this is where the problem lies.

    Hope it helps ;)
  • Mr Party HatMr Party Hat
    edited November 2007
    Surely implementing widescreen (which was an awesome move, by the way :) ) was much more difficult than simply choosing to use higher quality sound files? I haven't got a particularly good grasp of anything like this, I just assumed it was a case of having a bigger download size. Is there more to it than that?

    I'm not doubting that there's a reason, I just don't understand how increasing the sound quality would be anything other than a moments work?
  • TextureGlitchTextureGlitch
    edited November 2007
    Mr Party Hat wrote: »
    I just assumed it was a case of having a bigger download size. Is there more to it than that?

    I'm not doubting that there's a reason, I just don't understand how increasing the sound quality would be anything other than a moments work?

    So far the argument from Telltale seems to be "we're not going to do it", and not much deeper than that.
    It would seem exceptionally simple to do since each individual line is a separate file in the sound dir. The music and sound effects are already higher quality, so you'd only have to replace each dialog file with a higher quality one.

    Bandwidth is hardly a problem in today's P2P world. Just put out a torrent on the website here and after it's seeded in a few places the fans will pay for the bandwidth themselves.

    *shrug* Dunno. :confused:
  • BadwolfBadwolf
    edited November 2007
    I think if I had the choice between a high quality and low quality sound download, I'd get the low quality so I can get the game downloaded and running as soon as possible (maybe getting the high quality download/patch(?) afterwards).

    To be honest, I didn't have any problems with the sound in the first series. It did the job well, I could understand what characters were saying and couldn't hear any hissing unless I was actively looking out for it.
  • mothramothra
    edited November 2007
    i have an x-fi and the soundquality was mediocre, sorry, that's how I experienced it. still an awesome game, maybe next season. you won't loose me as a customer over this :D
  • Guybrush ThreepwoodGuybrush Threepwood
    edited November 2007
    The only time I notice the sound quality dip is whenever there is a word with a dominant sound being 's'.
  • TillTill
    edited November 2007
    Ack, that's really unfortunate. I'm not overly surprised that TTG is unwilling to increase audio quality for the downloads. But I am disappointed, to say the least, that neither of the DVD releases of season 1 (so I've been told) included repacked, improved audio.

    I believe they're using Speex, which in my experience -- I once tried to encode some audiobook CDs with it -- sounds awful even at its highest settings, and is only barely acceptable for its intended purpose of VoIP applications. But it should require few if any code changes to use Vorbis instead. Considering the entirely acceptable quality of low-bitrate Vorbis (even LAME these days does a remarkable job of compressing speech to about 96kbps VBR MP3s) and the amount of audio in any given Sam & Max episode, I can't imagine it adding more than 50MB to each one.

    I hope they're at least saving the original recordings, planning to extort us (and I mean that in the nicest sense of the word ;-) at a later time, maybe once Sam&Max has gone on hiatus and they can sell some multi-season pack. It would be terrible if such excellent games and voice-acting were forever marred by YouTube-quality audio.
  • MrSneezeMrSneeze
    edited November 2007
    From what I remember, it was mentioned within this forum that Season's 2 DVD version will feature better sound quality. Is that still a possibility?
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