ali-b912 t1_j1qb15d wrote on December 26, 2022 at 3:30 PM

Reply to comment by klogg4 in I am not an audiophile, so I wonder if I'm in the wrong here. by PraviPero

Compression isn't necessarily the problem. 16/22.05 WAV is going to sound alot worse then 320kbps MP3's; let alone 8/22.05

klogg4 t1_j1qcer6 wrote on December 26, 2022 at 3:41 PM

Absolutely agree with you (not for 8 bits though), but the thing is - these things do not have any compression artifacts, they are just highpassed hard way.

Also interesting thing is how game engines handle all the sounds. I have checked Half-Life 2 after I wrote a post, and was impressed that a lot of sounds there were 16/22.05. I have never payed attention to this in game. Maybe it's a resampling without high-pass filter (the ladder - of course it WILL make artifacts), maybe it's the reverb that worked marvelously in HL2, but still.

ali-b912 t1_j1qfyut wrote on December 26, 2022 at 4:08 PM

Tbf, you aren't going to hear a lot of the 11khz+ on speech, and most of the music in HL2 is electronic and kinda centered in the low/mid range (and lower volume). It's definitely noticeable I think on weapon sounds, but noticeably better then HL1.

In terms of games generally, you have to think about the fact that while compressed files are smaller, having to decompress is more math on top of the game for the CPU to do. If it can dump it in memory and stream from there it's fine, but in some consoles that wasn't easily doable. The other factor is physical media; generally CD's or DVD's back then. It was a trade off for developers. Less so now, where discs are just tokens to enable an online download.

klogg4 t1_j1qh64m wrote on December 26, 2022 at 4:17 PM

Speech is definitely 44.1 khz there, and music is MP3 (I don't remember what exact quality though). I was talking about sounds like Combine talk, zombies, headcrabs, etc - I was surprised to know that they're 22.05 khz.

>In terms of games generally, you have to think about the fact that while compressed files are smaller, having to decompress is more math on top of the game for the CPU to do.

Yeah, correct. That's why there aren't really any compressed files in any game - back then it was a bad idea because of CPU overhead, now it's a useless idea because it's not much of a disk space comparing to all the other resources.