Voice Comms Trouble

[killrDan]

I keep having issues with voice comms on an everyday basis.  I've been battling this gremlin since early fall.  It seems my voice comms only work sporadically.  The trouble is mainly in recieving voice comms but occasionally manifests itself on the transmitting end also.  It's almost like I have a squelch on my squad mates (OK no jokes here  ) .  I have absolutely no problems with sound outside the game nor do I have problems with sound effects in game.  It's almost exclusively the voice comms that are giving me trouble.  It gets frustrating when you have squaddies trying to converse and all of the sudden everything goes quiet.  It happens everyday.  I've emailed the Skuzzmeister my DXDIAG, I've changed headphones to a high end set, I've installed a fairly high end soundcard in my computer, I've re-installed a fresh copy of Win 7, and completly re-installed the game, and I've fooled with both Windows and game sound settings adnausem.  The problem persists.  No dropped packets either.  I do run the game off an SSD but the problem didn't start for several months after that change.  In fact, the only thing I can say for sure is that it started happening right after I replaced my lucky set of headphones that the dog broke.  May just be coincidence though.

Has anyone else had a problem like this?  Anyone have some legit technical advice?

[The Fugitive]

Did Skuzzy reply to you about the Dxdiag? If not then he most likely didn't receive it or his reply got lost in the problems some ISPs give them about mail. There are a list of them here...

http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,246515.0.html

As for the problem two things to check, one, how many sound devices show up on your Dxdiag? If you have one off your video card (HDMI) or a second one from the MB that you use along WITH the sound card you could be running into conflicts. Especially if the IRQs are the same. Second is the router/firewall setup you have. Some antivirus we stop returning packets which could be the ones with your coms in it. Check to be sure you have the right ports open, and AH allowed through. You might even try shutting down your antivirus while you play to see if that helps. BTW, which antivirus are you using? some are notorious for screwing things up more than they are for helping.

SKuzzy suggests that you don't run the game off an SSD, due to all the writes to it the game will perform. It could cause issues.

[Skuzzy]

Receiving voice communications issues are normally attributable to network packet loss.

Are you playing over a wireless connection?
Are you behind a router?  Have you power cycled the router recently?
Have you tried running a Ping Plot to 206.16.60.38 and see if there is any packet loss on the Internet connection between you and the servers?

Voice communications are all done via UDP protocols.  Simply put, if a UDP packet is lost, it is gone forever. 

[killrDan]

Well Skuzzy's diagnosis was correct.  I'm dropping packets at a couple servers that appear to be in Dallas.  Is there any cure?

[Skuzzy]

If packet loss is showing up in the final 2 hops, the problem is on the return trip back to your computer.  I need the Ping Plot data in order to run a trace back to your computer.