Voice Acting Sounds Muffled/Distant; Nothing Works

So I've seen a couple of other people with this problem around on the Internet, but none of the fixes in their threads have worked for me. When I listen to cutscenes that I know have voice acting (due to watching other people play them or because they worked for me at another time), the voices always sound extremely distant, muffled, and echo-y. Sometimes they're so quiet as to be inaudible.

For reasons I don't understand, the voices have worked for me exactly three times over the course of two months, but seemingly at random; I simply start up my computer/the game and the cutscenes work for some reason. But this is unreliable and purposefully restarting my computer, my headset, and/or the game in order to try and get it to work doesn't yield any results.

I've tried using three different headsets as well as my laptop speakers. I've tried going into the sound control panel and ticking/unticking every box that I can find in different combinations. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with the most commonly proposed fix, switching from 5.1 to Stereo or 7.1 (it was already on Stereo, but doesn't work on 5.1 or 7.1 either). None of my friends have this problem.

I'm also fairly sure it's unrelated to the game's sound settings since I've tried adjusting all of those, including listening position.

Needless to say I'm kind of frustrated and would appreciate advice on anything else I could try.

Is your Spatial Sound setting turned on or are you using some kind of "sound-enhancing" software (Windows Sonic, Dolby Access, etc.)? I've tried playing this game with Spatial Sound turned on and it didn't sound right so I turned it off.

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Originally Posted by Falmen

Is your Spatial Sound setting turned on or are you using some kind of "sound-enhancing" software (Windows Sonic, Dolby Access, etc.)? I've tried playing this game with Spatial Sound turned on and it didn't sound right so I turned it off.

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It's very likely something like this. I've discovered over my time PC gaming that every piece of sound enhancing software and "control panels" whether third party or manufacturer supplied are resource eating bug inducing hair pulling out pieces of chocobo dung. Quite literally had Asus Sonic Studio do something like this in another game (all settings default aka stereo) AND was causing a BSOD every time windows tried to update. I have purged it from my laptop, no easy task btw, and did not install it in my 3 week old desktop build on an Asus mobo. The windows drivers work well enough in most cases as long as you don't mind missing out on some of the "features".

Didn't seem to have an effect unfortunately. For the devices that did have the Windows Sonic option, they were already turned off, and turning them on and off again didn't seem to do anything. I disabled THX Spatial Audio, then uninstalled it completely, but neither of those seemed to do anything either.

Is the option hidden somewhere else I'm missing?

Update on this: it seems to be working now after restarting my computer (and uninstalling THX Spatial Audio beforehand). My headset is also working differently now, in the sense that before they had both a "headset" and a "headphones" output, but the "headphones" could only receive audio from one window at a time; now it can do multiple. Confused, but relieved to have gotten it working. Thanks

Update 2: it briefly stopped working again, including the return of the "headphones" output issue, but was fixed on computer restart.

Update 3: it appears that, if I join Discord before booting FFXIV on computer restart, the audio doesn't work. But if I boot FFXIV first, then it works even if I join Discord later.

Update 4: likewise, if I boot FFXIV before turning on my headset, the audio doesn't work. I have to boot my computer, then turn on my headset, then boot FFXIV. If I close FFXIV while I'm on Discord, I have to restart my computer to get the audio to work again, but as long as I had FFXIV opened before Discord, the audio is fine. The behavior is still really narrow and confusing, but at least it's predictable.

Razer THX Spatial Audio sucks.