Temporary Fix for Sound Issues (Headphones or surround sound required!)

Overview

Tired of the sound being so quiet? Getting your ears blasted by IM notifications? Well, until and unless it’s fixed, there’s an easy solution: use surround sound, on the cheap!

Hail, Arisen!

Dragon’s Dogma has taken Steam by storm, and an all new audience – myself among them! – is discovering the wonders of Gransys for themselves! However, the launch of the PC port has come with its fair share of bugs, despite the great effort put into the PC release.

One of the more subtle bugs is the game volume – most users are experiencing extremely low volume compared to all other sounds. This results in either quiet game audio at normal listening volumes, or blasted eardrums from IM notifications should one choose to turn the volume up.

I don’t pretend to know the exact technical reasons behind it, but it appears that the game is using some kind of surround mix when the game is outputting stereo sound, rendering the volume extremely soft. Because of this, the solution is fairly simple: play the game with surround sound!

Hardware Surround Sound Setups

Therefore, if you’re rich enough to wear a monocole wherever you go, the solution is already clear: set up five speakers and a subwoofer, or get one of those fancy surround sound headsets which provide the experience built in! Assuming Windows is properly configured to use all the speakers, Dragon’s Dogma should sound just like everything else on the system, volume-wise.

That said, proper surround sound is both expensive and difficult to set up. Even if you have the money to invest in new speakers of decent quality (or find a good sale), actually getting the speakers physically situated is something of a hassle.

As for the headsets, surround sound headset prices are ludicrous, especially given the sound quality involved. And if you use a headset or other system with an optical TOSLINK cable, like I have, your drivers have to support encoding surround sound in real-time to Dolby Digital or DTS…which they may not, if you have a cheaper motherboard or laptop like I do. While you can often hack it in[www.techpowerup.com] (at least for Realtek hardware), the process is pretty fiddly, and the results aren’t impressive, especially if you use a wireless headset that operates on the 2.4 GHz band that every other wireless device in the world does.

So, for those of us with cheaper audio hardware, the bad news is: you’re going to need headphones, at least if you want the full result. The good news: you don’t have to spend a dime, and it might just improve other games to boot.

Virtual Surround Sound

Just for the record, there are two kinds of software-based virtual surround out there. One of them is awful, and the other is not. We’ll be focusing on the latter.

The kind most people are familiar with is more of an artificial widening effect – the surround sound effects of TVs, laptops, and cheap soundbars, designed to make sound ‘bigger’ without any understanding of the underlying sound. More recently, however, there are solutions designed to use head-related transfer functions[en.wikipedia.org], or HRTFs, to create a more realistic illusion of distinct speakers as compared to . This technology is also known as 3D audio[en.wikipedia.org], as was known in the days of hardware-accelerated sound – or even today, with hardware audio restoration methods[pcgamingwiki.com].

While many games have HRTFs of their own, or can be

[PSA] For games using OpenAL (including Minecraft and anything that runs on Linux) turn on HRTF audio processing! from oculus

, virtual surround software essentially forces a game to use them by processing multichannel surround sources into HRTF-driven stereo. While this does mean only a few distinct positions of sound can be heard (as compared to true 3D headphone audio), it also means that it works with every game that has surround sound implemented!

Razer’s Free Virtual Surround

We’re going to be using Razer Surround[www.razerzone.com] as our solution today. There are a great many other packages out there, of course – as the BBC might say, ‘other supermarkets are available’ – and using any of the proper HRTF-driven solutions should work just fine. I’m using Razer’s software because it’s free, simple to set up, and very effective even on default settings. And despite the name, Razer Surround works with any pair of headphones out there – I use it with a $30 no-brand Bluetooth headset, and it works a treat!

Seriously, just install it, select your sound device, and turn it on. There’s other options to mess with if you have Razer headphones, or if you pay for the pro version, but this will fix Dragon’s Dogma just fine. As a note, I’m using it with on-ear headphones, and I haven’t tested it with earbuds – your mileage may vary on the effect, but the volume issue will be fine.

Remember to turn it off when you don’t need it, though. The virtual surround effect is great for games, and possibly for movies or other videos with surround sound content (I haven’t any around to check), but it lowers audio fidelity in general for stereo content. And if a game already has HRTFs, you’re limiting your positional audio to discrete positions.

Potentially, this could be used with TV speakers, but I’m not sure how it’ll sound – it’ll fix the volume, but it might distort things otherwise. I play on a TV myself, and sometimes I don’t want to wear my headset for the long play sessions this game inspires – try at your own risk!

Enjoy not blasting your eardrums!

Hopefully, Capcom will provide a fix for the couch gamers and speaker users out there. The devs are actively reviewing bug reports on the forums, so this guide may be somewhat redundant in the near future, save for the excessive amount of explanation I’ve given to surround sound technology, and the possibility gamers might enjoy this effect, both in Dragon’s Dogma and beyond.

But until then, stay fresh, stay fashionable, find a pawn of your favorite waifu or husbando, and enjoy your adventures in the land of Gransys!