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ali-b912 t1_j1qfyut wrote

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

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.

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klogg4 t1_j1qh64m wrote

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.

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