Guild Wars 2

I was wondering if anyone else had the same issue as me. A lot of the time I tend to play the game with 2 desktop speakers & a subwoofer. Whenever I come upon an NPC conversation interaction in the world the word bubble pops up over the NPC’s head as his conversation starts. The audio from that convo is extremely low & sometimes barely audible over my speakers & I find that the volume is directly tied to where my camera is “shooting” from, not from where my character is. When I play with headphones the audio from those same conversations is not tied to camera positioning & comes in loud & clear. I have messed around with the sliders in the game menu & have found nothing that can adjust this. Is this intended or a bug or am I missing something altogether?

I have the exact same issue.

I did not even know about some npc interactions till I heard from my gf’s game. I have this problem and CAN NOT find a solution. I keep trying every setting for my speakers and for GW2 setting. Can someone point me in the right direction to let me hear basic conversations and player chat?

Has there ever been a fix or support put in for speakers regarding this issue yet?

It would be a shame to purchase a 7.1 headphone peripheral only to find out that the sound system doesn’t support it.

I’m having the same issue. I’m thinking it could be my sound card, but my audio is fine with any other game and personal music.

Anyone know a fix? I have windows 8 btw.

Mortuus.7216:

It would be a shame to purchase a 7.1 headphone peripheral only to find out that the sound system doesn’t support it.

Sorry, 7.1 on a HEADSET is waste of money. It is still only 2.0 (it has only 2 speakers, dough!) and all you get is some crappy software remix to simulate the sound distortions you would have when listening to a low quality 7.1 system. (Thats really how they work. Trust me, i have disassembled more than just one.)

So if you want proper sound on you headset, then go into the windows audio settings and set your speaker layout to “headset”. Don’t fall for 7.1, the sound driver actually produces much better results when being set to “headset” instead of “5.1” or “7.1”.

Thats because how you ears (and the headset) actually work:
You know that sound has limited speed, and your ears are on the opposite ends of the head for a good reason. So the sound emitted from a single source will arrive at your ears at different times, your brain then calculates the position of the source based on the delay.

The sound driver for any type of headset does the opposite, it calculates the precise delay reflecting a certain angle and puts the audio on both ears, delaying one channel by the calculated amount. This is done for every single source of sound.

When using the 7.1 simulation, one additional step is inserted. Instead of calculating the correct delay for each sound source independently, the individual sound sources are assigned to one of the 7 virtual speakers first. Afterwards each of the speakers is treated as a new sound source and the calculation described in the previous paragraph is performed.

Sou you actually LOOSE details, to be precise: All the positions between the 7 virtual speakers which the driver could actually have calculated if run in native headset mode. That is why you should ALWAYS prefer “headset” mode over “7.1” mode.

So why do 7.1 headsets even exist, if they actually produce WORSE results than regular headsets when used properly?
Thats for 2 reasons, first of all, 7.1 sounds better than 2.0 so people will fall for it and will pay more money for crappier products.
Second, most people owning headsets wont understand, that they need to tell their computer that they HAVE headsets and not just 2 speakers on their desk. So they run their headsets in 2.0 mode (which is plain wrong, as sounds are assigned to one of 3 possible positions (left, right and both equally) only!) so they actually feel an improvement when using 7.1 headsets. There would have been none (or they would even notice the degradation) if they had been smart enough to configure their headsets in the designated way in the first place.

TL;DR:
Ranting on 7.1 headsets, how they work, why regular headsets actually sound much better and how to configure your PC to make use of headsets so it won’t treat them like ordinary desktop speakers (which led to the poor sound impression of the regular headset in the first place).

As for the “camera is microphone” issue, it works quite well if you ACTUALLY use a REAL 5.1 or 7.1 system. If you use a headset, configure it as a headset, everything else is just stupid. (Read the text you have skipped, if you want to know why.)