Audio popping issue

[MoonstalkerZ]

The thing about blaming our hardware as the problem - they provided a benchmark. We ran the benchmark, it told us our computers could handle Endwalker, and we bought the game based on this information. They then rewrote the sound system, AFTER releasing the benchmark. If their ultimate solution is to say 'just get a better computer,' then their actual system requirements are different from their advertised system requirements, and this is a blatant case of false advertising.

This is why they MUST fix this issue, if only for legal reasons. It's just a question of how long it will take.

[Elliah-Seraheart]

The thing about blaming our hardware as the problem - they provided a benchmark. We ran the benchmark, it told us our computers could handle Endwalker, and we bought the game based on this information. They then rewrote the sound system, AFTER releasing the benchmark. If their ultimate solution is to say 'just get a better computer,' then their actual system requirements are different from their advertised system requirements, and this is a blatant case of false advertising.

This is why they MUST fix this issue, if only for legal reasons. It's just a question of how long it will take.

Pls read this article. It perfectly explains what is actually happening.
https://www.gsmarena.com/understandi...news-49490.php

It's pretty stupid, that we cannot play the game because some esoteric audiophile on the sound team felt like he needed to advocate for sound nobody can actually hear, and effectively strangle our drivers and CPUs to death, for "improvements" in sound that arent even audible for humans to begin with - cannot be heard on most equipment - and sounds like ass because the audio fed into it is not designed to be spatial.

ALL the complaints people have with FF14 audio, ARE side effects of the way audio is handled - and mentioned as "disadvantages" throughout this incredible article. Once you get a grasp on how this works, it's crystal clear what is happening, and that it has NOTHING to do with our hardware - and is ONLY because of the stupid effin embody thing.

Its this 100%

Let's look at the first advantage that high-resolution audio brings, which is higher bit depth. When you reduce the bit depth of the analog to digital conversion, you add more noise during the quantization process when it has to be converted back to analog. By increasing the bit depth, you naturally reduce the noise and thereby increase the dynamic range.

However, even with undithered 16-bits, you can get a dynamic range of 96dB, which is very close to maxing out the limits of human hearing (120dB), and the additional headroom offered by 24-bits (144dB) goes so far beyond it that it even exceeds the limitations of most equipment. In other words, you can't hear it.

Secondly, clever techniques like dithering can help reduce and shape the noise even in a 16-bit signal such that it would be inaudible to anything except precise equipment. The dynamic range of a dithered 16-bit signal can easily be made to go beyond 120dB by reducing and reshaping the noise in the audible range. This means for all practical purposes, 16-bit is perfectly adequate for human ears.

The other advantage high-resolution has is higher sampling rates. A 192kHz sampling rate means the audio can have a frequency response ceiling as high as 96kHz. As I already mentioned, humans can only hear as high as 20kHz, that too only those with perfect hearing at the prime of their life. Most people have even lower frequency responses than that.

For audio to have frequencies beyond the humanly audible range is like having a TV that shows light outside of the visible range. You can hear 96kHz sound almost as much as you can see X-ray. Which is to say, not at all.

Having to reproduce audio with such high frequencies can also put a strain on the equipment and drivers, which can introduce additional distortion. This distortion most definitely is in the audible range, which means you're distorting sound you can hear for the sound you can't hear.

How is it that I, someone who has never in their life even held an instrument, has never produced even a second of digital audio, and cannot write any code is able to test, troubleshoot and pinpoint the issue - yet an entire team of experts fail to foresee this problem, and has not been able to reproduce, troubleshoot or pinpoint it in 25 days. I have 0 expertise. I'm just an obsessive cunt with ADHD who does this for fun. This is not a onepunchman reference. I'm legitimately clueless - yet seemingly figured this out. Infuriating.

Edit:
Here's a video of me showcasing how to reproduce the bug - what audio channels are affected by what settings - and how the issue presents itself in cutscenes - channel by channel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYGu2rv3gbg

I even pretty much proofed, that the CPU strain due to floating point calculations in older CPUs is NOT the cause of the audio distortions (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqythtdgs8g), by SEVERELY straining my CPU by folding proteins (floating point calculations).

[Sarhina]

Pls read this article. It perfectly explains what is actually happening.
https://www.gsmarena.com/understandi...news-49490.php

It's pretty stupid, that we cannot play the game because some esoteric audiophile on the sound team felt like he needed to advocate for sound nobody can actually hear, and effectively strangle our drivers and CPUs to death, for "improvements" in sound that arent even audible for humans to begin with - cannot be heard on most equipment - and sounds like ass because the audio fed into it is not designed to be spatial.

ALL the complaints people have with FF14 audio, ARE side effects of the way audio is handled - and mentioned as "disadvantages" throughout this incredible article. Once you get a grasp on how this works, it's crystal clear what is happening, and that it has NOTHING to do with our hardware - and is ONLY because of the stupid effin embody thing.

So, something of a Luddite here, but wouldn't the solution be fairly simple, remove that from the code, or is it too interwoven with everything else?

[MoonstalkerZ]

So, something of a Luddite here, but wouldn't the solution be fairly simple, remove that from the code, or is it too interwoven with everything else?

I don't think there's any way of knowing without being able to read the code. From what little I understand of programming, things can get really tangled up, and removing one seemingly unrelated thing can mess up sixteen other things.

[Lagunow]

I don't think there's any way of knowing without being able to read the code. From what little I understand of programming, things can get really tangled up, and removing one seemingly unrelated thing can mess up sixteen other things.

The most painful part is the the fix can go from simply changing a boolean value to "we can't do anything about it because it would break everything else. And there is no way for us to actually know.

[AeroXaia]

How is it that I, someone who has never in their life even held an instrument, has never produced even a second of digital audio, and cannot write any code is able to test, troubleshoot and pinpoint the issue - yet an entire team of experts fails foresee see this problem, and has not been able to reproduce, troubleshoot or pinpoint it in 25 days. I have 0 expertise. I'm just an obsessive cunt with ADHD who does this for fun. This is not a onepunchman reference. I'm legitimately clueless - yet seemingly figured this out. Infuriating.

To be fair, while the support representatives on the English side, uh... could have done better (let's go with that, lol), you and a lot of us have been pretty focused on this because it's dramatically affecting the experience of the game, while the team working on things like this has a lot of other things going on and are surely pretty distracted by the whole queue situation, which might have been a bigger fire to put out. On top of that, holidays and such.

I think the biggest lesson though is to not release something like this at the same time as the expansion content. It would have been better to do it months before and work out any potential kinks, when there wasn't content patches or expansions going. I feel like they might have been pushed into doing it sooner by the whole business deal aspect, but who knows. It sounds like sometimes the higher ups have different ideas of when things should be done sometimes, and promise deadlines the team can only race to meet.

The biggest software "release" I did so far only went out to around 100 people, and I botched it the very first time in a similar way, doing a bugfix for a program not many use but adding features at the same time, which introduced a glaring new bug. I felt bad about it and didn't have a proper release channel to easily fix it, and basically panicked to revert the new features and just do the bugfixes alone and rerelease, messaging people individually that I knew got the scuffed version (but some I couldn't know about and they'd have to show up to update again on their own). Large companies can't be so agile and quick to respond, but a note just acknowledging it as a known issue like people have said a few times would have really went a long ways. I can't help but feel there are business and legal angles messing with it all that I just can't comprehend.

Good communication helps a lot. Here's a bonus video of stutter when looking from a normal angle, but not from below. Definitely not about specs. https://youtu.be/4XpUjy_zj9c