Frog with laryngitis

[Crash Orange]

I've got two headsets and one standalone mic and none of them will work reliably with AH2 Voice radio. I have tried varying every setting in game sounds and voice (including turning Wave In on and off), playing with the input levels, speaking more loudly or quietly, and moving the mic(s) around, and *nothing* gets it to work even halfway reliably. I'll get a setting that is at least halfway intelligible, then I'll move the headset slightly and it goes to crap and and nothing I can do gets it working again that night.

The frustrating thing about this is that all three mics are very easy to set up so they record a perfect, crystal-clear .wav in any application but AH, withn or without background noise. It's only running them through AH that turns my voice into rasping croaks or a faint hiss. And listening to other players I can tell I'm far from the only one having this problem. Offhand I'd say maybe one in three of the people bothering to use vox come through clearly enough to understand without difficulty, and another third enough to be even slightly intelligible.

What is with the Voice function? Does AH2 just set an additional noise filter that's way too high? It shouldn't be this difficult to do something that is so easy outside the game!

[Skuzzy]

The quality will be determined by the sound card and mic, along with any ambient noise levels.  Turning the gain (volume setting for recording) too high can cause clipping to occur which makes the recording worse.

As far as overall quality goes.  It is very easy to have nice quality outside the game as the CPU is not busy doing much anything else critical.  In the game, the flight simulation requires the CPU attention all the time.  Flight simulation is very CPU intensive.  Much moreso than any other type of game on the market.  We also have to be mindful of the network as well.

Onboard sound chips have really hurt being able to move forward with this as they require significantly more CPU time than a good add-in PCI sound card does.  Unfortunately we are stuck with them.  And that is not saying addin sound cards cannot suffer the same issues.  They can, but usually to a lesser degree.

[Crash Orange]

Thanks for the explanation.

Can you (or anyone) recommend any resources for learning how to get it working better? The help files don't say a lot.

[Skuzzy]

There really is not much to do.

1)  If using onboard sound, make sure you have the hardware acceleration set to 3/4, not Full in the Sound tab of the DXDIAG panel.  This does not apply to Vista as Vista does not have DirectSound support.
2)  Try adjusting the recording volume lower in Windows to see if you are clipping.
3)  Try using the "Use Wave In" option and try it without.
4)  Do not use any custom sound packs at all.  They can contribute to a lot of sound issues when using an onboard sound chip.
5)  Turn the "Maximum Texture Size" down to 256 in the game's "Video Settings".  This is a quick resource reduction in the cases where resources are being starved.  Does not hurt to try it.
6)  Make sure the sound card/chip is not sharing an interrupt with another high usage data device.  In some cases you will not be able to change this due to how the motherboard was designed.  Sound devices do not share interrupts well.