Any word on the sound quality?
Last season, (perceived) bad audio compression was a source of much debate. IIRC, there would be a kind of tool redesign that would make it easier to swap out audio files for higher quality ones (and/or different language ones, which was an important reason for the redesign). So, what's the status on this?
Will season two have higher quality sound than season one? Will there be separate downloads that increase audio quality?
Will season two have higher quality sound than season one? Will there be separate downloads that increase audio quality?
Sign in to comment in this discussion.
Comments
Nope, and nope. Sorry
I'd lie if I'd say it did not bother me. But as CaptainXax said, the music quality is top notch, and the dialog more than make up for it!
Sam: You don't even know what that means!
Max: Yes I do! It's like a metal floor, without the L's.
Where exactly did you get that from?
what exactly is "source of sound" referring to?? i didn't notice any problems with sound quality so far..so what should i avoid changing?
I noticed a difference when I went from the speakers built into my monitor to external speakers, but nothing that really distracted me when I wasn't looking for it.
My Souncard is an Audigy 2, that has stayed the same. I have a set of creative 2.1 speakers where I believed the 'booming base' disguised the compression artifacts.
I have since gotten myself a pair of Sennheiser earphones, and while the base is still VERY good and prominent, the higher frequencies are also much more descernable. I believe this is where the problem lies.
Hope it helps
I'm not doubting that there's a reason, I just don't understand how increasing the sound quality would be anything other than a moments work?
So far the argument from Telltale seems to be "we're not going to do it", and not much deeper than that.
It would seem exceptionally simple to do since each individual line is a separate file in the sound dir. The music and sound effects are already higher quality, so you'd only have to replace each dialog file with a higher quality one.
Bandwidth is hardly a problem in today's P2P world. Just put out a torrent on the website here and after it's seeded in a few places the fans will pay for the bandwidth themselves.
*shrug* Dunno.
To be honest, I didn't have any problems with the sound in the first series. It did the job well, I could understand what characters were saying and couldn't hear any hissing unless I was actively looking out for it.
I believe they're using Speex, which in my experience -- I once tried to encode some audiobook CDs with it -- sounds awful even at its highest settings, and is only barely acceptable for its intended purpose of VoIP applications. But it should require few if any code changes to use Vorbis instead. Considering the entirely acceptable quality of low-bitrate Vorbis (even LAME these days does a remarkable job of compressing speech to about 96kbps VBR MP3s) and the amount of audio in any given Sam & Max episode, I can't imagine it adding more than 50MB to each one.
I hope they're at least saving the original recordings, planning to extort us (and I mean that in the nicest sense of the word ;-) at a later time, maybe once Sam&Max has gone on hiatus and they can sell some multi-season pack. It would be terrible if such excellent games and voice-acting were forever marred by YouTube-quality audio.