Cutscene Voices Severely Muffled

[Shea]

When playing the game all sounds but cut scene voices are fine. But the voices in cut scene are severely muffled.
Edit: Using Razor Megladon Headphones. Just tested 7.1 surround sound and all speakers worked. Did a second test with TV speakers and cut scene voices were fine. So must be a driver issue with headset, disregard.

[GuiltyBoomerang]

Interesting, I use the Megalodon in it's 2.1 mode and everything is fine. As far as I know, FFXIV has no surround sound option.

[Raist]

It supports positional audio and 5.1... cards can convert that to 7.1. Can make it work in Win8 too with 4CH setups, depending on the card and it's audio extensions. It's all emulated to some degree anyway, so good drivers and chipset can sort of do it off just a 2CH stream to some degree.

IDK just what could be tripping up the muffling though. Could be something funky in the drivers or the config settings, if you've ruled out something wrong with the speakers. Go through all the options in your cards control panel and see if it has separate settings for the audio channel for input as well as output. Make sure they are set properly to match up (2, 4, 6 channel from Windows source, and the actual speaker configuration on the output).

On my Xonar, I have one that selects the channels used by the Windows API, and another drop box for my actual speaker jacks on the card. I can set the windows stream to anything from 2CH up to 7.1, and then my output config to anything in the same range as well. Basically, I can run 2CH audio out to 2, 4, 6, 8 speakers, or run up to 8 channels of audio to 2, 4, 6, 8 speakers (and it will emulate surround if up/down scaling the output).

If your soundcard doesn't allow you to set them separately like that in you interface, you may need to go into the Windows Control Panel/Sound snap in, select your speakers and open their properties page, then go into their configuration and set it there as either 2, 4, or 6 channels.