Duke sound fx quality seems off?

[Trooper11]

Hey, I'm coming from eDuke32 and I really like how the raze renderer looks with palette emulation and original sector lighting. Only problem is the game sounds strange, almost underwater? Any ideas?

[wildweasel]

There's a setting under the Sound Options that filters the sound, which is on by default. Disable this filter and you'll be back to your crispy Duke.

[Trooper11]

Figured it out. Had to set OpenAl resampling to Nearest and restart audio. Thanks!

[Graf Zahl]

Just out of curiosity, what kind of speakers are you using?
For me the noise being added to the sound mix by the lack of interpolation is unbearable.

[Trooper11]

I'm using Koss PortaPro headphones with AutoEQ applied. I guess it's a question of whether you want things to sound scratchy or muffled, I prefer scratchy.

[Graf Zahl]

I use a home theatre stereo system. I even hear the recording background hiss on some poorly produced samples with that...

[Rachael]

You can try a little compromise and use Cubic. It should soften the blow a little bit but bring the littlest bit of charm out. It still sounds a little muffled but it's nowhere near as bad as muffled as linear sounds.

But fact is fact - the sample rate on that audio is just horrible. Squeezing that much digitized audio into a 20 meg uncompressed archive before mp3 was widely available was not easy.

[Graf Zahl]

I know. Many of Dukes sounds are below 8kHz, some even below 6. They could have used ADPCM compression which would have increased their budget sufficiently to do everything at 11 kHz.

[Phredreeke]

You could also try Dzierzan's HQ sound pack

[NightFright]

There was/is a sound replacement using the sounds from the PSX release, which are all 22kHz. It doesn't seem like a big difference, but there's actually a lot more depth and detail in the sounds. Sadly, not all sounds are available and some are too different from the PC version to use, but the rest is 100% authentic and a solid sound replacement for the base game, like Per Kristian's highres sounds for Doom.