Hissing voice recordings once again *sigh*
 

Hi,

i just registered my account to post this issue as it bothers me since the first "Sam & Max" Season by Telltale. It's an issue of purely technical nature. No criticising of artistical quality.

Telltale apparently uses a really (and i mean REALLY) bad compression algorithm for the voice recordings as they HISS very badly. I'm certain that this is not the fault of the recording studio (it would be bankrupt anyways with such bad quality work) as the german voices of Sam & Max for example hiss just the same way they do in english.

I wouldn't write here if it wouldn't really bother me but it does. BIG TIME. And I don't get it. Every average shooter with a hilariously stupid plot and bad voice acting has ultra-clear sound quality whereas here - a game heavily focused on dialogs - sounds like a game from the mid-nineties.

There are high quality audio codecs for free which certainly do a better job than this (OGG, for example). Why not use one of them?

Tell me, Telltale. Please!


PS: If my grammar appears to be strange: english is not my native language.

actually, they do use ogg vorbis - at least in Sam and Max.

Really? Then either OGG is really bad for voices or they must use a really aggressive compression. I played some more of the demo and you can really hear it in every sentence. Expecially "th" becomes a total mess.

I'm a big fan of "Grim Fandango" and even though the game is already more than ten years old the sound quality of the voices is better.

The problem is that I hear the hissing ALL the time. Every "th" or "sh" sounds like compressed to death. Unbearable.

EDIT:
Btw: http://www.telltalegames.com/forums/...ead.php?t=1594 - here you can find a thread in the S&M forum with the exact same complaints two and a half years before. There is even a suggestion for a free audio codec optimized for speech (Speex). It's really a shame that nothing has changed since. :(

Here's an even older thread than that, where I first mentioned the compression:
http://www.telltalegames.com/forums/...read.php?t=691

If anything the sound quality seems to be even worse than it did back then, and significantly worse than Hit The Road from 1993! It's now 2009 - do we really still need to keep download sizes so low that the quality has to suffer? How about two choices of download size with varying sound quality - you could even keep one "hidden" to avoid confusing more casual players.

It's such a shame that such an easily avoidable issue affects what otherwise seems to be an excellent game.

Its sad we get hurt by the Wii, because there is no other reason not to increase the sounds quality and size, seriously if people are on super slow connections that is their own fault. they just have to spend that hour or 2 more. Good sound quality is one of the building blocks of a good game, especially for us who have a really good sound system for the Computer, you can really hear it.

and it cant be that hard to make a standart version and a another downloadable version with super high quality sound can it ? :)

W&G isn't planned for the Wii so that shouldn't be holding it back. What will be interesting to see is if things are any different on XBLA. Surely Microsoft wouldn't certify a game with such poor sound quality... would they?

Yes it's somewhat annoying, but it will surely be fixed for episode 2.

Okay, here is a good comparison for people who don't really understand what we are talking about:

First, watch the trailer on the website: http://www.telltalegames.com/videos/...dgromitpreview
Then, watch the same trailer in the demo.

Concentrate on the voices. Hear it? The sound quality in the trailer on the website actually is of BETTER quality than in-game! Enough bandwidth for online advertising but not for the product you should buy? Odd.

This is the first time I hear anyone complain about this. Are you sure it's just the games?

I didn't have this issue at all. The sound quality in S&M1 + 2 was excellent throughout, the same with Strong Bad.

There's no reason that it should be, since we made that trailer by capturing footage directly out of the game.

More likely the difference you're hearing is caused by how the game sounds on the computer we used to capture the trailer, and how it sounds on your own computer.

We do use audio compression to keep file sizes smaller, and it sounds better on some setups and worse on others, but this complaint has always been very subjective. We wouldn't ship something if it sounded hideous to everyone who played it, on every computer out there. ;) We do our best to reach a happy medium with the compression.

Thank you for your reply, Emily.

There are two possibilities why only a handful of persons are complaining about it:

1. The problem needs a rather high aural sensibility to recognize it - or better: to get annoyed by it. - Maybe. But I can recognize it immediately without concentrating at all. And I'm not an audio engineer or smth.
2. The persons sound setup causes the problem. - Also possible. But heavely unlikely, at least in my case as it is the only game where this problem occurs to me. And i own and play quite a few games and they all sound nice. (Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS + Logitech Z 5300)

So, maybe I'm too picky or maybe my soundcard and speaker suck. But if any of these would be the reason - why does no other game sound so bad for me in terms of voice quality?

For what it's worth, some audigy drivers do a fair amount of post-processing on audio that can emphasize compression artifacts. You might want to check your settings to see if any reverb effects or the 'crystallizer' setting are turned on.

Any post-processing is deactivated by default. And the Crystalizer you mention is exclusive to the X-Fi series i think. I've got CMSS(2) and certain EAX effects to choose from. But none is active.

I just replayed some parts of the demo with my Sennheiser headset plugged in and the hissy voices stay exactly the same. :(

And check the equalizer too : if you hear a lot of hisses, don't add too much high tones, or you'll hear the compression a lot !

I just launched the ingame "Preview" with my SB Audigy 2 (all effets off) and hearing on headphones (Sony MDR-7506), the voices sounds the same than Sam & Max. It's not great quality, of course you can hear the compression, but it's enough I think. With all the speech the game includes, having a little improvement on sound quality would make the file grow a lot.

(And, I use subtitles, so... ;))

Old games, like the first Sam & Max (HTR), used 8 bit 22050 Hz sound, in VOC format. It was not compressed like MP3, but the sound was very noisy. Music was simple Midi files (and sometimes a CD track).

The main problem for me is, like other threads talked about, the sound mixing (music being too loud for the speech).

Well, usually i have 55% treble. But on 50% default setting it's the same. And lowering it even more would only decrease overall sound quality.

I've checked the files in the Wallace & Gromit demo "pack" folder and it says:

• 1_wallacegromitdemo_pc_data.ttarch - 98,2 MB
• 2_wallacegromitdemo_pc_voice.ttarch - 3,73 MB
• 3_wallacegromitdemo_pc_ms.ttarch - 12,4 MB

If I assume that the "voice" file contains the speech samples, then a compression factor even half the size would increase the overall size only by a small amount.

It's funny how I never ever heard hissing on any of my computers... This must truly be a sound card oddity. I'll have to say that the acoustics of some S&M season 1 voices sound a bit hollow/"small room" like, but that improved over time anyway. :)

About compression: I'm a person who's more annoyed by the compression/low res on textures and stuff sometimes. I'd love for Telltale to lower the compression a bit on these for DVD versions and stuff...

The 's' sounds by the neighbor lady sound really bad to me. It really does hurt the overall experience. I'm sad. The other voices aren't bad at all though. The flower lady's voice just breaks quite a bit whenever she says an s. It's not just a little glitch you can notice - it's hard not to pay attention to it when you play.

Is there really no way for you to provide a 'hi-def' audio version for those with the bandwidth to download it? It couldn't be that much work to make a bit less compressed audio package available, would it? It'd really make a difference, at least to me and apparently to several other people too. Please don't dismiss this as pointless bickering. :(

First I have a background in the film and though I am not an audio engineer I do have a fair amount of knowledge in regards to proper audio quality.

I just signed up specifically to chime into the big reason why all the dialog has a crackly, crispy, and distorted sound to it.
It is called audio clipping which occurs when the audio engineer mixes the audio level beyond the threshold, or rather the range. What you will hear then is distortion and when excessive with speech you will experience those annoying artifacts. Everyone has a strong digital lisp, painfully apparent with the neighbor lady.

Audio compression, different from mp3 compression, is another annoying attribute that is far too common in the game industry and notoriously in the music industry. Audio compression reduces dynamic range in order for the sound to be louder, when used properly it is an essential tool but these days it is excessively abused.

I enjoyed the demo from a visual and game play aspect but the poor mixing between the various audio elements is frustrating and should be addressed with separate volume levels. Why is the music mixed so much louder than the dialog?
Frankly it all sounded very lo-fi. I know the ogg format can deliver clean dynamic audio if that is what is provided. Heck a game from 1996, the Pandora Directive has cleaner dynamic audio than today's stuff.

This is not a driver or sound card issue, this is an originating audio engineering issue which is perpetuated by those who have lost some hearing and listen to low quality audio sources, such as todays modern music recordings and earbuds, on less capable audio systems.

Unfortuntately this is a big reason why I haven't purchased any of the second season of Sam & Max or even completed the first series because of these issues.
I know my equipment and it is not the highest end stuff in the world but it is more than adequate to reveal great recordings and accurately reproduce poor ones. Alas as far as the demo shows and S&M this is systemic to Telltale Games audio department and even worse is that so many people assume that crispy distortion equates to good sound.

I lament the good old days of Hi-Fi.

Best Regards
KvE

-Not affiliated with this site.
Check out this website to learn more about audio compression and audio clipping. There are additional articles in respects to these issues.
http://www.audioholics.com/education...rm=compression

PPS
Actually to disprove my observation someone should extract the dialog audio and examine it in an audio editing suite, please post some pics because it will be very telling.

Thanks for all the feedback, everyone. We are continuing to tweak the audio for the final release to hopefully address some of the issues that have been mentioned here.

Seriously... I never have ever had this problem, but here is what telltale needs to do.

#1) provide very high quality voices in the releases, at least triple the quality so that it sounds good on all sound setups.

#2) but this is going to make the game rather large, and may take a lot more time to download for some users with slow connections, so telltale should offer individual episodes on CD (nothing fancy, just the installer and files on a plain disc in a paper holder so they can be made for little/no charge) for those who it would take a day or longer for them to download the game... these discs would be separate from the bonus DVD gotten for purchasing the season set and made available to ONLY those who really need them.

That way... everyone is happy, case dismissed