Hissing voice recordings once again *sigh*
Hi,
i just registered my account to post this issue as it bothers me since the first "Sam & Max" Season by Telltale. It's an issue of purely technical nature. No criticising of artistical quality.
Telltale apparently uses a really (and i mean REALLY) bad compression algorithm for the voice recordings as they HISS very badly. I'm certain that this is not the fault of the recording studio (it would be bankrupt anyways with such bad quality work) as the german voices of Sam & Max for example hiss just the same way they do in english.
I wouldn't write here if it wouldn't really bother me but it does. BIG TIME. And I don't get it. Every average shooter with a hilariously stupid plot and bad voice acting has ultra-clear sound quality whereas here - a game heavily focused on dialogs - sounds like a game from the mid-nineties.
There are high quality audio codecs for free which certainly do a better job than this (OGG, for example). Why not use one of them?
Tell me, Telltale. Please!
PS: If my grammar appears to be strange: english is not my native language.
i just registered my account to post this issue as it bothers me since the first "Sam & Max" Season by Telltale. It's an issue of purely technical nature. No criticising of artistical quality.
Telltale apparently uses a really (and i mean REALLY) bad compression algorithm for the voice recordings as they HISS very badly. I'm certain that this is not the fault of the recording studio (it would be bankrupt anyways with such bad quality work) as the german voices of Sam & Max for example hiss just the same way they do in english.
I wouldn't write here if it wouldn't really bother me but it does. BIG TIME. And I don't get it. Every average shooter with a hilariously stupid plot and bad voice acting has ultra-clear sound quality whereas here - a game heavily focused on dialogs - sounds like a game from the mid-nineties.
There are high quality audio codecs for free which certainly do a better job than this (OGG, for example). Why not use one of them?
Tell me, Telltale. Please!
PS: If my grammar appears to be strange: english is not my native language.
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
I'm a big fan of "Grim Fandango" and even though the game is already more than ten years old the sound quality of the voices is better.
The problem is that I hear the hissing ALL the time. Every "th" or "sh" sounds like compressed to death. Unbearable.
EDIT:
Btw: http://www.telltalegames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1594 - here you can find a thread in the S&M forum with the exact same complaints two and a half years before. There is even a suggestion for a free audio codec optimized for speech (Speex). It's really a shame that nothing has changed since.
http://www.telltalegames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=691
If anything the sound quality seems to be even worse than it did back then, and significantly worse than Hit The Road from 1993! It's now 2009 - do we really still need to keep download sizes so low that the quality has to suffer? How about two choices of download size with varying sound quality - you could even keep one "hidden" to avoid confusing more casual players.
It's such a shame that such an easily avoidable issue affects what otherwise seems to be an excellent game.
and it cant be that hard to make a standart version and a another downloadable version with super high quality sound can it ?
First, watch the trailer on the website: http://www.telltalegames.com/videos/wallaceandgromitpreview
Then, watch the same trailer in the demo.
Concentrate on the voices. Hear it? The sound quality in the trailer on the website actually is of BETTER quality than in-game! Enough bandwidth for online advertising but not for the product you should buy? Odd.
I didn't have this issue at all. The sound quality in S&M1 + 2 was excellent throughout, the same with Strong Bad.
There's no reason that it should be, since we made that trailer by capturing footage directly out of the game.
More likely the difference you're hearing is caused by how the game sounds on the computer we used to capture the trailer, and how it sounds on your own computer.
We do use audio compression to keep file sizes smaller, and it sounds better on some setups and worse on others, but this complaint has always been very subjective. We wouldn't ship something if it sounded hideous to everyone who played it, on every computer out there.
There are two possibilities why only a handful of persons are complaining about it:
So, maybe I'm too picky or maybe my soundcard and speaker suck. But if any of these would be the reason - why does no other game sound so bad for me in terms of voice quality?
I just replayed some parts of the demo with my Sennheiser headset plugged in and the hissy voices stay exactly the same.
I just launched the ingame "Preview" with my SB Audigy 2 (all effets off) and hearing on headphones (Sony MDR-7506), the voices sounds the same than Sam & Max. It's not great quality, of course you can hear the compression, but it's enough I think. With all the speech the game includes, having a little improvement on sound quality would make the file grow a lot.
(And, I use subtitles, so...
Old games, like the first Sam & Max (HTR), used 8 bit 22050 Hz sound, in VOC format. It was not compressed like MP3, but the sound was very noisy. Music was simple Midi files (and sometimes a CD track).
The main problem for me is, like other threads talked about, the sound mixing (music being too loud for the speech).
I've checked the files in the Wallace & Gromit demo "pack" folder and it says:
If I assume that the "voice" file contains the speech samples, then a compression factor even half the size would increase the overall size only by a small amount.
About compression: I'm a person who's more annoyed by the compression/low res on textures and stuff sometimes. I'd love for Telltale to lower the compression a bit on these for DVD versions and stuff...
Is there really no way for you to provide a 'hi-def' audio version for those with the bandwidth to download it? It couldn't be that much work to make a bit less compressed audio package available, would it? It'd really make a difference, at least to me and apparently to several other people too. Please don't dismiss this as pointless bickering.
I just signed up specifically to chime into the big reason why all the dialog has a crackly, crispy, and distorted sound to it.
It is called audio clipping which occurs when the audio engineer mixes the audio level beyond the threshold, or rather the range. What you will hear then is distortion and when excessive with speech you will experience those annoying artifacts. Everyone has a strong digital lisp, painfully apparent with the neighbor lady.
Audio compression, different from mp3 compression, is another annoying attribute that is far too common in the game industry and notoriously in the music industry. Audio compression reduces dynamic range in order for the sound to be louder, when used properly it is an essential tool but these days it is excessively abused.
I enjoyed the demo from a visual and game play aspect but the poor mixing between the various audio elements is frustrating and should be addressed with separate volume levels. Why is the music mixed so much louder than the dialog?
Frankly it all sounded very lo-fi. I know the ogg format can deliver clean dynamic audio if that is what is provided. Heck a game from 1996, the Pandora Directive has cleaner dynamic audio than today's stuff.
This is not a driver or sound card issue, this is an originating audio engineering issue which is perpetuated by those who have lost some hearing and listen to low quality audio sources, such as todays modern music recordings and earbuds, on less capable audio systems.
Unfortuntately this is a big reason why I haven't purchased any of the second season of Sam & Max or even completed the first series because of these issues.
I know my equipment and it is not the highest end stuff in the world but it is more than adequate to reveal great recordings and accurately reproduce poor ones. Alas as far as the demo shows and S&M this is systemic to Telltale Games audio department and even worse is that so many people assume that crispy distortion equates to good sound.
I lament the good old days of Hi-Fi.
Best Regards
KvE
-Not affiliated with this site.
Check out this website to learn more about audio compression and audio clipping. There are additional articles in respects to these issues.
http://www.audioholics.com/education/audio-formats-technology/cd-compression-depression/?searchterm=compression
PPS
Actually to disprove my observation someone should extract the dialog audio and examine it in an audio editing suite, please post some pics because it will be very telling.
#1) provide very high quality voices in the releases, at least triple the quality so that it sounds good on all sound setups.
#2) but this is going to make the game rather large, and may take a lot more time to download for some users with slow connections, so telltale should offer individual episodes on CD (nothing fancy, just the installer and files on a plain disc in a paper holder so they can be made for little/no charge) for those who it would take a day or longer for them to download the game... these discs would be separate from the bonus DVD gotten for purchasing the season set and made available to ONLY those who really need them.
That way... everyone is happy, case dismissed
Sound quality has been a problem with both seasons of Sam & Max and with Strong Bad, so I'm also hoping this is something that will be fixed in the future. A separate download "patch" with higher quality dialogue for those who want it? Or just increase the download size for all, though since you've got download caps and crazy stuff like that in the states, maybe download size is a bigger issue there than in Europe.
The audio is still not good enough.
I still support a separate download option for higher quality voices. I don't know why the "casual episodic gaming" style of Telltale is so much against big downloads. Everyone who uses Steam games don't seem to complain about the 1GB-2GB downloads for every game, even the ones in the casual category.
It is completely impossible. Please, take headphones and listen to the ingame preview and compare it with the online trailer. Voices are very clear online and crappy in game. And I bought the game, not the video. So, I ask for quality in the game.
Perhaps you took the video out of the game, but not audio.
Game is great. I had to use my headphones (Sennheiser hd595). Those headphones are quite good but they also require much better sound. I can hear noise in almost every speech. But it is not the biggest problem. Looks like one ogg is badly coded. In a second act (with angry bees) Wallace is talking via phone with police officer. There is a glitch every 2 second. I am not sure if it is every 2 second but it is cyclic.
How high is the "Wav Sound" slider in your volume controls? (Windows controls) Also are you connecting an external amplifier (Powered speakers) to your system?
My thought is that your audio is clipping, and therefore distorting. Try turning down the specific volume controls (wave, sw synth, etc.) or turning down the computer sound and turning up your external speaker volume.
This is what was claimed with the Sam & Max trailers too, and yes, it can't possibly be true. The speech audio in the released versions is crap, and there's no way you can remove such obvious compression artifacts. So don't insult our intelligence by talking about different systems blah blah blah, when we've all played dozens of games on the same system that sound just fine. TTG obviously has no intention of fixing the problem, as they've made multiple DVD releases without changing it.
BTW, it's not clipping. It sounds nothing like clipping. It's typical digital artifacts that occur when you crank up the compression. Maybe some people don't mind that, but it's very obviously there in the released, downloadable game. And not in the trailer. Which I'm sure was recorded in *a* version of the game, just not the one released to us proles.
I can't claim to have a hifi audio set up, but I don't have problems getting reasonably good sound in other games, movies and music, so I doubt it's a hardware problem per se.
I also wonder what the codec and bitrate in current use is. Doubling the bitrate may already do wonders, and might not increase the file sizes too much (at least for Wallace & Gromit, which seems be less dialogue-intensive than Sam&Max).
"Allowe me to intrroduzhe myszhelf: Guybruzh Tshreepwood."
Seriously I do demand a response from Telltale, it can be a private message or a forum response but I will not let Telltale destroy Monkey Island with crummy audio.
I am willing to listen to reason, but I need Telltale to give me reason to work with.
(no it is not my hardware: X-Fi Platinum sound card, Etymotic ER 6 earphones, and no other game sounds the way Telltale games do.)
Does anyone know how to fix the problem? I've got the latest sound drivers for the sound card and I've tried playing around with different modes (it's an X-Fi). Crystallizer is off by default.