Audio popping issue

[PaulH]

I am relieved to be seeing this forum post. I thought I was going mad with EW and the popping sound, crackling, headset, speakers etc. Thanks all for your efforts. I tried a few things and I keep losing spell sounds so glad it isnt me.

[SerenaEclipse]

Idk about y'all but for me the sound just seems off... I was not getting popping... But I would get a stutter here or there... Or I'd notice the cutscene audio would start quietly and randomly get louder... Also I have never once heard the RDM ability scorch prior to EW.. and now it's very annoyingly in my ears ... Looking at you Erik (it's not there fault) also Holy seems much quieter to me.. Additionally it just seems to me like a lot of the combat sound effects are muffled or quieter I'm general (except for RDM scorch)

[VaireAsani]

Reporting in to say I finally tried using the spatial sound option (via their free trial) and it made 0 difference :/

[FunkyBunch]

I'm randomly having the special effects drop and voice acting drop.
Seems to happen after a few hours of being logged in. So annoying as the only way to fix it is to relog, which can take hours.

[HyoMinPark]

I played all through Early Access without experiencing any sort of audio problems, but after the emergency maintenance a couple days ago, now I notice it all the time. Battle effects stop working, boss skills/AOEs don’t play, skill sounds from us or other party members don’t play, character voices cut in and out. Background music seems fine—it’s the only thing that doesn’t cut out for me. Sometimes the sounds come back within a few seconds. Other times they stay broken.

I tend to have the bug where my sound all cuts out except the background music—and interestingly enough, my character wasn’t performing the animations for the actions when the sound was cutting out. I checked my VPN and did not see any packet loss or other ping spikes that could have caused the issue instead, since I know lag will cause animations not to play sometimes.

Sadly, the only remedy I’ve found is closing the game completely and restarting it. Simply relogging did not fix it. And sadly that’s not a great fix given the state of the queues in this game. It only really works if you do it in the late night/very early morning hours when queues aren’t thousands of people. :c

I hope this is fixed because it’s incredibly jarring. And I rely on sound queues in battle with regards to certain mechanics, so it’s kind of messing with that a bit.

[Larxene]

Putting my 2 cents in as well... I know there was some discussion that it might be related to older parts but I just got this PC and am experiencing the same issues.

The issue started for me the FIRST mini-boss during the first EW dungeon. The audio cut out completely, and I was able to get it half back by setting the equalizer to standard (it was set at logitech initially)-- however, my battle effects were gone and anytime I pressed a skill action I'd hear an annoying clicking. The MSQ lacked voice acting as well and it's incredibly frustrating as other fixes suggested in the thread have done nothing to help.

As it is, I can only get BGM and some system sounds-- but even the BGM will pop every so often. This isn't playable. I was so ready to enjoy this expansion fully but after spending a week in queues to get another barrier I'm not sure I'll even try to play for a while.

My PC:
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600x
OS: Win 10, latest updates


EDIT: I relogged the next day just to see if it got better and I haven't had the issue since-- the only change I've made is not using my headphones, and keeping the sound settings to CD quality.

[Stormhold]

I tend to have the bug where my sound all cuts out except the background music—and interestingly enough, my character wasn’t performing the animations for the actions when the sound was cutting out. I checked my VPN and did not see any packet loss or other ping spikes that could have caused the issue instead, since I know lag will cause animations not to play sometimes.

Sadly, the only remedy I’ve found is closing the game completely and restarting it. Simply relogging did not fix it. And sadly that’s not a great fix given the state of the queues in this game. It only really works if you do it in the late night/very early morning hours when queues aren’t thousands of people. :c

Pray tell, if You have several "Output" devices, including DS4 controller (OR DS5). For me game tends to output different sound "layers" in separate devices and I fixed it by disabling those devices in Windows settings.

[Sekigawa321]

any news from SE regarding this?

[AsheNabuddis]

Only news we've got is the acknowledgement of the issue in "know endwalker issues" in the news, and the Sound Director's tweet about knowing about it and trying to fix it.
No real ETA so far.

[minopoki]

I finally gave up on this. After installing the game to an SSD and that changing nothing, there's nothing more I can try.

I was thinking, if the cause of this problem was a change to the audio driver, all they needed to do is add an option for changing back to the old driver and maybe everything would be fine. Or would Endwalker new stuff really not work with the old driver?
Although that change would require an update of the client, I think it could pretty much be implemented at anytime, it shouldn't have to make us wait until the 21st.

Honestly, I'm kinda afraid that whatever fix they intend to add in 6.01 ("if any adjustments are needed") might really not work for everyone, just like some fixes that have been proposed by the community work for some people but not for most of them.

It really seems SE sees this as a minor problem, even though there are about 30 threads on this issue here on Lodestone, this one having over 200 comments and a few of them around 40-60, not to mention Reddit, YouTube etc.
Even though it's not really acceptable that we have to wait until the patch, it doesn't seem we have much choice.

If by the patch this isn't fixed though, I'll just have to leave the game…
It's very disappointing that'll have to abandon a game that's so special to me and did so good to my mental health through the last 2 years for such a stupid reason.
Even if I could afford a computer newer (and more expensive) than the one I currently have (which would only be possible for me like 6 months to 1 year from now), it would be such a waste to spend money on it only for the sake of Final Fantasy XIV, while most games I'm interested in still work in my current PC.
Which means that if this issue doesn't get fixed soon, it would probably take years for me to be able to return to the game…