Audio popping issue

[EvilKiwi]

Another issue that I didn't realize until doing old duties for the first time since 6.0: The sound balance is messed up, let alone the bass and other players' volume. It's particularly noticeable with Ambient Sounds in Arm of the Father for the electrified water.

Oh my god, yeah. I see it in certain dungeons and duties. And I always have sound effects around 45 percent. Ran lvl 75 dungeon and when the statutes with the first add finish their aoe lines, the sound is ovepowering everything else. It's mind boggling!!

Speaking of when I hear it the most, for some reason its with a dps like red mage or bard. I play healer for the main story, and after the hoops i went through with the audio, I can hear the stutter only a few times thankfully, but the sacrifice is that the audio quality is frankly utter shit.

Also I finally see Square responded.... with saying it's on our end again. A'ight, bet, I'll try their ''fix'' THOROUGLY this evening. Also that is not a fix, that is putting the blame on us, yet again.

[Grimno]

Oh my god, yeah. I see it in certain dungeons and duties. And I always have sound effects around 45 percent. Ran lvl 75 dungeon and when the statutes with the first add finish their aoe lines, the sound is ovepowering everything else. It's mind boggling!!

Speaking of when I hear it the most, for some reason its with a dps like red mage or bard. I play healer for the main story, and after the hoops i went through with the audio, I can hear the stutter only a few times thankfully, but the sacrifice is that the audio quality is frankly utter shit.

Also I finally see Square responded.... with saying it's on our end again. A'ight, bet, I'll try their ''fix'' THOROUGLY this evening. Also that is not a fix, that is putting the blame on us, yet again.

Yeah even when it's working for me the audio just sounds... ehhhhhhh at times
Like I can hear the "spatial audio" kick in and try to muffle certain combat sounds when it's not popping and it just sounds so weird.

Maybe how like the game engine had it's 1.0 phase that needed burning down...
Now we've hit the 1.0 phase of their audio engine.

[Teiren]

I do remember the benchmark sounding the same as always before Endwalker, yeah.

And looking at my post again as I updated it for Smileton: While I know it's not exactly helpful to be accusatory, it's really the only thing that makes sense to me, unfortunately. And Spatial Audio just looks so pretentious, lol. Not to mention that, no offense because this isn't a strike against the game (quite the opposite), I just don't think FFXIV is advanced enough to really take advantage of it. Even people that have legitimately used it say it's either muffled or not very good.

[Teiren]

I'll see what that's like if I end up doing that duty in a roulette. But yeah, having done only Endwalker stuff since release, naturally, I just plain couldn't know any better beyond hearing some oddities with my job sounds and other people's volume that I quickly got used to. But now that I'm back to doing roulettes since yesterday, I can directly compare my experience before and after Endwalker of all those duties I've done a LOT before. It's...sad.
At least I have my memories, and as I always know to be true, it could always be worse. And it IS for many people. I consider myself fortunate and certainly do not take it for granted now.

[Slendercat3]

Their patch to fix things, 6.01, is what broke it for me. Definitely cause by enemies being near me.

[shandreax]

I am a bit worried they are seeming to say its a non-issue on their side and blaming everyone's systems instead of making sure it was compatible. lowering sound quality was a complete joke stating it could be straining our systems (*this is not grapes made with too many pixels). The people who made this wonderful new sound engine are not willing to fix the issue since their engine is perfect.

An issue wherein certain sounds do not play correctly under certain conditions.
* We expect sound issues created after the release of Patch 6.0 to be resolved via adjustments to the sound engine. Should you continue to experience sound-related issues, we recommend the following:
Open the Windows control panel, select your default audio device, and view properties. Then, under the Advanced tab, select a lower setting for the default format. (A lower bit rate and Hz range is less system intensive.)

I am now on CD quality (my lowest setting for my speakers) for game and sounds like I threw a few bricks in a Dryer and hit max speed.(see youtube for that video) When in combat its bad now in raid with 8 peeps its beyond insane..... you did not fix it and apparently the above instructions that seem to be saying its due to our audio not able to handle the game and lower the settings so its not too intensive sounds really funny hmmm... everything was fine prior to patch for YEARS!! and now drum roll!! <<<< oh I would not be able to hear that over this NOISE!

[rPilcrow]

Time to throw my hat in the ring:
I'm having audio popping issues, but it's almost exclusively in dungeons and trials, and like pretty much everyone else has only started with the release of 6.0. The 6.01 patch did absolutely nothing, and I am having no audio issues with any other game.
It was bearable until the lv89 dungeon, and then got REALLY bad during the second trial, which is extremely disappointing because it obliterated the atmosphere and made it impossible to listen to the music.
It isn't just EW content that's been affected; I've also noticed audio popping in a few other situations, Thornmarch was bad for example.

[Lagunow]

Ok, so now that queues are more bearable I got up earlier today and did some through testing. I logged in and out more than 20 times testing many different settings. I put the game on the most stress I possibly could, here is what I found:

- Using DX9 and capping FPS to 30 are absolutely the only "sure" things that appear reduce the issue down to a playable level. Anything else was either placebo, ramdom/situational or a very minimal improvement. I will test the CPU power solution after work today.

- Setting graphics to low, changing equalizer to standard, updating drivers, using a "virtual cable" software are all placebo or give minimal temporary relief, if at all.

- The issue is not caused by graphic settings, as it was playable with average settings and even on high, as long as I was using DX9. If I use DX11, however, the glitch occurrs even with low graphics.

- After patch 6.01, activating immersive audio immediatly triggered the glitch. Which is weird since on 6.0 it had the opposite effect of making it more bearable. Edit: Probably has to do with the fact that I have to use DX11 to turn on immersive audio.

- Muting ambient sound like some are suggesting did not solve it, quite the opposite in fact, it made it worse.

- Once the audio glitch is triggered, there is nothing you can do to fix it besides a fresh restart. Logging out to the title screen and back again does not solve it. You have to close the app, and restart back from the launcher. Sometimes it fixes itself if you wait long enough, but it's very random.

- Alt tabbing does seem to ramdonly trigger the audio glitch sometimes. Most of the time it doesn't, though. Possibly depends on what kind of app you're alt tabbing into. Haven't looked into it that deeply, but I suggest closing any apps you're not using and killing any unecessary background processes when you run the game just for precaution.

For reference, I've tested on multiple ingame situations that are known "culprits" of triggering the noise glitch: instanced rooms such as rising stones, cutscenes with lots of npcs on a enclosed space and combat. I have not tested dungeons yet.

[AeroXaia]

Ok, so now that queues are more bearable I got up earlier today and did some through testing. I logged in and out more than 20 times testing many different settings. I put the game on the most stress I possibly could, here is what I found:

- Using DX9 and capping FPS to 30 are absolutely the only "sure" things that appear reduce the issue down to a playable level. Anything else was either placebo, ramdom/situational or a very minimal improvement. I will test the CPU power solution after work today.

- Setting graphics to low, changing equalizer to standard, updating drivers, using a "virtual cable" software are all placebo or give minimal temporary relief, if at all.

- The issue is not caused by graphic settings, as it was playable with average settings and even on high, as long as I was using DX9. If I use DX11, however, the glitch occurrs even with low graphics.

- After patch 6.01, activating immersive audio immediatly triggered the glitch. Which is weird since on 6.0 it had the opposite effect of making it more bearable. Edit: Probably has to do with the fact that I have to use DX11 to turn on immersive audio.

- Muting ambient sound like some are suggesting did not solve it, quite the opposite in fact, it made it worse.

- Once the audio glitch is triggered, there is nothing you can do to fix it besides a fresh restart. Logging out to the title screen and back again does not solve it. You have to close the app, and restart back from the launcher. Sometimes it fixes itself if you wait long enough, but it's very random.

- Alt tabbing does seem to ramdonly trigger the audio glitch sometimes. Most of the time it doesn't, though. Possibly depends on what kind of app you're alt tabbing into. Haven't looked into it that deeply, but I suggest closing any apps you're not using and killing any unecessary background processes when you run the game just for precaution.

For reference, I've tested on multiple ingame situations that are known "culprits" of triggering the noise glitch: instanced rooms such as rising stones, cutscenes with lots of npcs on a enclosed space and combat. I have not tested dungeons yet.

There's definitely different variations of it then. Ambient has a very noticeable effect for me, and limiting FPS does nothing. Once broken it used to stay broken, but unmuting ambient makes it recover like whatever's getting bogged down starts clearing up after the spell spam stops enough. It's like there's a meter that fills up and past a certain point starts distorting, and recovers when there's less going on, but some areas just do it even without any spells at all.

If wonder if different types are based on what CPU people have, but that sounds like a lot of work to gather the info. For reference:

SYSTEM_CPU AMD FX(tm)-8350 Eight-Core Processor (8 CPUs), ~4.0GHz
SYSTEM_CORE_NUM SYSTEM_CORE_LOGIC 8 SYSTEM_CORE_PHYSICS 4
GPU: AMD Radeon R9 270x
RAM: 16gb DDR3

Edit: To be clear, when I said CPU power I meant this option: https://i.ibb.co/X5cQJV2/cpu.png (Most people probably have it at 100% already unless they're on power saver or on a laptop.)