Warframe and virtual surround sound don't play well together

[RedDirtTrooper]

I know that some folks have nasty things to say about virtual surround sound, but I enjoy it a lot and think the technology has come a long way. I game using a headset with virtual 7.1 surround processing and find it adds immensely to the immersion when playing games. Well, most games... Warframe for some reason just defaults to stereo because it sees two speakers. Is there any way we could get a toggle to force 5.1 or 7.1 audio out instead of relying on the outdated windows system speaker info? I get full directional audio in every single game that lets me turn it on, which is making warframes audio seem pretty awful in comparison when I know it could sound just as good.

[-Tzek4-]

I made a seperate thread similar to this but it looks like warframe does have it but you have to fiddle with the audio settings before the quality jumps up.

 

[IfritKajiTora]

I already made one forum thread when Octavia was released to bugs section.

I have speakers 5.1 and Octavia music don't have bass sound when her sound device is in front of player or behind the player. Only left and right speakers play with subwoofer .

And I only got reply from DE or someone that reads bugs section and check if it's true, that it works perfectly fine and I must have something in my system. But all other games works on my subwoofer when the explosions are behind or in front of me for example. Didn't tested how about other sounds in Warframe, but Octavia is not playing bass properly on speakers 5.1

[RedDirtTrooper]

13 hours ago, -Wholas- said:

I made a seperate thread similar to this but it looks like warframe does have it but you have to fiddle with the audio settings before the quality jumps up.

 

I've gone through the audio settings looking, even dug in the configuration files in the app data folder. So far I haven't found any sort of way to get more than stereo out of it, but if anyone knows of a way to make it work I'd love to hear about it. Found one reply from someone at DE ages ago saying that it was enabled automatically based on the speaker configuration with no way to manually adjust it.

Edited December 14, 2017 by RedDirtTrooper

[[DE]George]

8 hours ago, RedDirtTrooper said:

I've gone through the audio settings looking, even dug in the configuration files in the app data folder. So far I haven't found any sort of way to get more than stereo out of it, but if anyone knows of a way to make it work I'd love to hear about it. Found one reply from someone at DE ages ago saying that it was enabled automatically based on the speaker configuration with no way to manually adjust it.

Have you tried adjusting the "Select Audio Output Device" in Options->Audio from within the game?  Let us know if that works for you.  Thanks.

[RedDirtTrooper]

49 minutes ago, [DE]George said:

Have you tried adjusting the "Select Audio Output Device" in Options->Audio from within the game?  Let us know if that works for you.  Thanks.

Yes, I just get stereo sound if I set it to default or directly to my headset. From what I understand, the problem is that the driver for my headset doesn't fake having extra physical speakers, apparently, some manufacturers do this to get around this issue. It's not a problem for any game that lets me actually toggle on surround sound, if there's an option in the menu to flip to 5.1, or 7.1, it works perfectly every time, but Warframe doesn't give me that option. As far as I can tell Warframe is polling the system instead, and even though my headset has sound processing for surround sound because it accurately reports that it has two speakers Warframe just sends it stereo sound. 

[[DE]George]

23 hours ago, RedDirtTrooper said:

Yes, I just get stereo sound if I set it to default or directly to my headset. From what I understand, the problem is that the driver for my headset doesn't fake having extra physical speakers, apparently, some manufacturers do this to get around this issue. It's not a problem for any game that lets me actually toggle on surround sound, if there's an option in the menu to flip to 5.1, or 7.1, it works perfectly every time, but Warframe doesn't give me that option. As far as I can tell Warframe is polling the system instead, and even though my headset has sound processing for surround sound because it accurately reports that it has two speakers Warframe just sends it stereo sound. 

And setting the audio options from Windows control panel to 5.1 or 7.1 doesn't work?

[RedDirtTrooper]

5 hours ago, [DE]George said:

And setting the audio options from Windows control panel to 5.1 or 7.1 doesn't work?

Nope. It's not that big a deal, just a little disorienting to go from other games to warframe and suddenly lose my situational awareness from sounds. I'd love to get it fixed, but I've lived with it for a long time now.

[[DE]George]

We will look into supporting this in the New Year.