Guild Wars 2

ok here is an issue for you, already submitted as a support ticket. and also to m-audio too

when i am taking part in events where there are lots of effects going off (greneth event manly this happens) my game audio randomly stops and i get an oscillating tone play constantly. now i have limited it to Guild Wars 2 and not my sound card or drivers. the reason how i know this is that i am able to converse on TeamSpeak, Ventrilo or Mumble at the same time and others can hear the oscillating tone via my mic.

anyways i do not use a standard sound card per say. the sound card is an M-Audio Delta44 and Delta 1010 they use the same card but different interphace (i ose the 1010 mostly). to save you the research, its a professional audio sound card that allows multitrack recording with 0ms latency.

with this sound card you can change the sample rate and buffer size to basically anything you want from standard to non standard settings. no matter how i configure my sound card i get the same issue, rarely this causes the game to crash my PC.

so you probably wonder how i know this is limited to Guild Wars 2? well when this happens, i finish the event, after turning my speakers off then shut down the game. Guess what? the oscillating tone stops. while this is happens i can still hear and use VoIP software listen to my music/video/etc. i have even loaded up another game while GW2 is running and have no audio issue with that game

currently my audio setup is a complex customized 7.2 surround sound system which is designed by myself. i split the audio in to multiple tracks then to other external hardware hardware such as crossovers, effects processors, expanders, graphic eq’s and power amps then to my speakers, as i said complex. i have gone to the lengths to allow this oscillating tone to play for hours while i diagnose my system from PC to audio hardware and even the speakers themselves.

via software and hardware analysis the oscillating tone is coming from the Guild Wars 2 application and not from my sound card or my hardware. do not try this at home, but i wired up a USB oscilloscope (Picoscope) to my sound card while this tone was playing. the signal was getting to the card pre-process so basically the the sound card is not producing the tone.

as i said, this is a slightly unique issue as i do not think many player will be using the same sound card as i do. i also have no other sound cards, not even an on-board one.

this issue could just be happening to me, if not then please let me know, if it is then i can live with that

I’ve had this happen to me twice (once in beta and once last night.) I don’t know what kind of sound card I have if I even have one.
The sound only comes from the left ear of my headset and is definitely the game itself. Changing the in game audio settings doesn’t do anything, but I managed to mute it by going to the Windows volume mixer

I use a simple soundcard and I have this very same problem. The oscilatting tone persists until I either restart the game or switch to Digital Audio. Switching back to regular audio (this is in the ingame Sound options by the way) will resume the strange tone. Turning the audio to 0 does nothing and the horn will persist.

EDIT: After reading AnFace’s post, I’d like to add that I only hear the sound coming from the left ear of my headset as well.
From what I can tell, this started happening after one of the patches a few weeks ago, though I cannot pinpoint which one it was. It is very annoying as I either have to restart my game after a big event or play without sound by putting my sound on Digital Audio.

Had this issue spring up twice. Just as you guys have stated; it’s always during a really epic event. First event was when we bust open a gate in WvW with hundreds of people involved. The second event was during a fight with the Claw of Jormag. I thought it was my sound card, but alt tabbed out to find everything working just fine. Alt tabbed back in, same annoying sound. Relogging seemed to fix it.

i am glad its not just me, well i did submit a ticket about it hopefully this gets fixed

Happens to me too, during large scale anything, like the the Castle zerg in WvW, only cure is restart my pc, making me have to re-queue for WvW with a dam 2 hour wait /angryface.

This issue has come up for me on several occasions as well. It has happened on my Gamecom 780 headset (USB) and my 5.1 surround sound speakers. I have up-to-date drivers and play on an ASUS P8P67 Pro motherboard.

Evidently dropping sound quality to 50% is solving this for some. I dropped mine to 50% but haven’t been in enough large events to quantitatively say it resolved my issue.

In any event that doesn’t resolve the bug, just user’s issue with having to deal with it.

I have exactly the same problem however in only ever happens in W v W. I’m using a Soundblaster X-fi card.

Thanks for posting this I had the same problem in WvW the other day, repro’d on all audio devices on my machine, so it seemed unlikely that it was a hardware issue.

Changing the audio settings had no effect.

It happened very soon after I enabled Crossfire + Eyefinity (which has introduced other problems in GW2), so if anyone else has that commonality please note it!

same issue here, came here looking exactly for this too. Its freaking annoying, AN don’t do this to Jeremy Soule! Its inhumane! Anyways drama aside, yeah in large scale events its happened…two particular events are the Claw of Jormag and the Priest of Balthazar and it will happen constantly int hose events. I have to log out and log in multiple times during the event to and will still get the issue persisting until it is over.

Same here, happened to me several times already, always in medium to large keep sieges in WvW.

My sound issue came up in Claw of Jormag and a medium keep siege in WvW as well!

I have had this problems as well, and a couple people i have chatted with came across this problem we found out we where all using razer head sets. this might be the problem.. who here has this problem that has a razer head set?

I use a Gamecom 780 headset. Like I said earlier though, it also happened while using my speakers instead of my headset one night.

I too have had this problem, it’s quite annoying. A long humming noise and it causes all sound to disrupt until I exit the game. Happens on large events like WvW and dragon attacks in PVE

I have this issue as well, and I also had another graphical issue. As a result of the graphical issue, I borrowed a friends video card to see if that fixed the graphical problem, which it didn’t. (Turned out to be an unstable CPU overclock on my part.)

Any ways, pertaining to this issue, once I switched out my AMD HD 4870 to my friends 6870, I haven’t had this sound problem. I had to give him back his card yesterday as he was selling it on ebay, and today I played with my old 4870 and the issue happened again.

Now when it comes to sound cards, I am actually using a USB DAC, and not an onboard card, so not sure if that says anything. But people, try changing graphics cards if that option is available to you. If you do not have the issue, it COULD be GPU related then.

My 2 cents and experiences.

There have been many threads about this, and ArenaNet has responded saying they don’t know what is causing the issue yet.

This happens to me too, doesn’t matter what soundcard I use and it’s only big events / sieges that triggers it.. if I just go on playing it will eventually crash the game..

I thought this was a driver or hardware issue until I read this thread. I’ve been experiencing it as well.

It’s been discussed. Lower your setting from Highst audio quality to a tab under.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Annoying-Sound-Bug/

Happened to me twice during a guild event over a period of 3 hours and both times when fighting bosses with around 30 guild mates. I had to restart the game and log back in to restore the sound. I did have the sound set to high so i will notch it down and see if that helps.