thecrankyhermit wrote on 2020-08-19, 16:04:Okay, this is very odd. When I have IndirectSound's eax2 enabled, positional separation seems to be "harder," for lack of a bett […]
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Okay, this is very odd. When I have IndirectSound's eax2 enabled, positional separation seems to be "harder," for lack of a better word. But I periodically hear - and I swear I'm not joking here - the game pause sound effect from Super Mario Bros. 3. I only hear it during action, and it's quieter than the normal sound effects, but it's there, and I may hear it as often as twice in a minute.
Doing any of the following seems to disable the SMB3 sound:
* Turning off IndirectSound's eax2
* Setting DeviceName=Generic Software
* Lowering the "Sound Effects Volume" by a lot
* Audio Effects: Off
Haha, this made me smile 😀
One of the problems with the faked EAX emulation in IndirectSound is that some games (correctly) use obstruction or occlusion which is supposed to do a low pass filter that IndirectSound doesn't do. In some cases this isn't a big deal, but if there is a lot of obstruction/occlusion then the sound should get very quiet, but in IndirectSound it will still sound loud. This is why EAX fake emulation is now disabled by default.
My guess is that's what causes the SMB3 sound to be audible (and why lowering the volume fixes it). It might also be there without EAX but just played at a lower volume.
This wouldn't help you fix anything, but if you want to satisfy your curiosity you can email indirectsound@gmail.com and we can try to capture the sound to hear it in isolation and figure out what it really is.
thecrankyhermit wrote on 2020-08-19, 16:04:
When I have IndirectSound's eax2 enabled, positional separation seems to be "harder," for lack of a better word.
IndirectSound itself doesn't do anything differently with 3D sound with eax2 enabled, but it's possible the game itself might have different settings somehow. I wouldn't recommend using either eax1 or eax2 with IndirectSound unless it's necessary (some games won't enable 3D sound without it). None of the EAX effects are actually emulated (yet), and things might actually sound worse instead of just missing (like with the obstruction/occlusion example).