Please PROPERLY address audio stuttering issue

[EvilKiwi]

Bumping this up too. Never have I ever had this problem with any of the expansions. What helped me a little bit was changing the audio quality on my PC, along with going to dx9, putting listening position to character and lowerin the volume of sound effects. But it is still there. The audio is SHIT now, and I hate playing on dx9.

This isn't just ''lol it's your fault''. I have new games on my older game PC (Like Baldur's Gate 3, and that's graphically MORE challenging on my PC than FFXIV which plays at nice 50 ish FPS), and that NEVER happened there.

I may be fortuonate that I did not start at the launch of the expansion, but if this is still there, after almost 20 days and the fix did NOTHING then that's not us. I feel sorry for the players who have had this problem since the beggining of the expansion. This might seem drastic, but I canceled my subscription and if it is not fixed I won't be ressubing. I can just play other games with no problems that won't say that it is our PC's fault. Absolutely unacceptable.

[Austratus]

I feel like maybe it's been a little less for me since patch 6.01 launched, but I still have audio stutter issues when entering combat and the "fix" mentioned in the patch notes (to lower the audio quality to each device) really doesn't help.

I'm hoping this can be continued to be looked into, because it's a mark on an otherwise stellar expansion IMO.

[Teiren]

Adding my voice to this issue.

The only audio issues I had since 6.0 and before 6.0.1 were as follows:
- Something a little weird with the bass, I think, but not terrible.
- Absolutely no combo sound (not low volume, actually no sound).
- Other people's action volume low, although still audible.
- Combat voices of both PCs and NPCs much louder than they should be. Even the unvoiced sound effect volumes of some NPCs' auto-attack (such as Midgardsormr) or getting hit (such as The Griffin) are strangely high.
- Money sound when buying/selling items considerably loud.

I had no audio stuttering problem of any kind at any time before 6.0.1. Now, after 6.0.1, I'm having the same stuttering problem as countless others during combat with normal settings. I also always get it for a few seconds upon logging into an inn room, oddly enough. Changing bit rate and/or hz does nothing at all, nor muting & unmuting Master Volume or muting Ambient Sounds. I never get an FPS drop during it.

The only thing that seems to affect it is setting Listening Position to 100 (not even 95, but 100), and even then it's not a 100% fix; stuttering can still crop up sometimes but much less often then. However, such a setting is naturally uncomfortable and not a solution. Moving camera around so you don't see as many things also seems to affect it. With 6.0.1, I do hear the weaponskill combo sound again, but it's a little quieter than it should be, which implies the intrinsic root cause of the issue is not dealt with.

It seems what someone said in a Reddit thread is the key: It has to do with how many objects are between you and your target or the source. ALL signs point to the awful Spatial Audio as the cause, or more specifically, the engine being changed to support it. It all feels at least a tiny bit weird and just off, honestly, even when it is working.

Please, for the love of god, get rid of Spatial Audio so you can go back to 5.5 sound engine. The game is ruined at its BEST time. To say this is not good is the biggest understatement one could make about FFXIV. If nothing else, please undo whatever was done in 6.0.1 because that only made it worse, or in my case, actually added the stuttering when I had none anywhere before. I'm begging you.

[paga]

So after 6.0.1 I also have issues with the sound, before that it worked perfectly fine.

Its not as bad as others but I do have slight crackling every so often which doesn't make the game unplayable for me but still lowers the enjoyment.

I have a Ryzen 7 5600x and a RTX 2080, FPS always over 100.

[Teiren]

To follow up, I'm happy to say that two times now, I've not gotten any audio stuttering whatsoever in the final dungeon of Endwalker. However, I did get it in the second-to-last dungeon of Endwalker, The Weeping City of Mhach, The Final Steps of Faith, and Alphascape 2.0. I really can't explain it. I originally assumed I got no stuttering in the final dungeon because the environment there may have slightly less simultaenous objects than other dungeons, but Final Steps of Faith and Alphascape 2.0 are just as relatively sparse. I really don't get it.

Please. Just go back to 5.5's sound engine. Please.

[GrimmStronghammer]

Bump. I'm also continuing to have the issue.

[minopoki]

So, in the Japanese Forums, they suggested we tried the LatencyMon software to detect latency issues for audio.
My result turned out bad, as seen in the image below.

How is everyone else's result?
To check, open LatencyMon, click the green start button, wait at least 5-10 minutes, and if it gets Green, it means it's good, black means not so good, red means bad.

If you get a green result, try then running the scan while playing FFXIV to see if results change.

[Godel]

Fx-8350 user here. Changing bitrate from 24bit48k to 16bit44.1k (lowest possible) was not even noticeably impactful on the amount of stuttering. Changing from DX11 to DX9 helps audio but it hurts graphics and at the end of the day the audio issue is still there.

I don't think LatencyMon results really mean anything....I am getting spikes over 2k µs range even without any applications running, yet I've never experienced audio anomalies while using any other applications. With FFXIV open it did spike up to 4.6k µs however, but the audio stuttering was happening even when it was consistently showing measurements <1k µs.

[Ariel_Valmont]

Want to bump this thread as well due to the comprehensive list of links on the main page. Fix the issue already!

[Muew19]

Make legacy sound settings option for us so we can use SHB sound engine. This new sound engine is problematic.