Audigy 2ZS Headphone Sound Cone issue

[sid_freeman]

Not sure what the best way to describe this is but here goes. Just got an Audigy 2ZS and set my BF2 audio settings to hardware, high and enable EAX. When playing with headphones there's something wrong with the sound effects and it's distracting. Seems like it's trying to emulate actual human hearing but it's way over-exaggerated. The sound is really good but only when I'm facing the source of the sound directly.

For example, I'm standing 50 yards or so away from an artillery attack and can hear the great sounding explosions when I'm looking at it. When I turn my back to it, the sound is almost completely eliminated. At another point one of my team-mates was in a jeep directly behind me honking and it sounded as if he was hundreds of yards away. Only when I turned my head to the side did the sound get loud enough to realize he was next to me.

When I turn the audio settings to software, high. The game sounds amazing. I can everything going on around me. What's the deal with the hardware setting? Is there a Creative option I'm missing?

Thanks in advance.
Sid

[coco]

Re: Audigy 2ZS Headphone Sound Cone issue

Yes your right, the volume difference has been over exaggerated, so if you have your in BF2 audio effects sound turned down it makes it almost unhearable at the low end.
This is a problem for lots i know personally who play the game.

[big_sammy_b]

Re: Audigy 2ZS Headphone Sound Cone issue

sounds to me like you have your windows speaker settings set as 7.1 for your speakers and not stereo headphones.

I have that same card with headphones and i dont have any problems like that unless i accidently leave windows set as having 7.1 speakers.

[Hugh G. Wrection]

Re: Audigy 2ZS Headphone Sound Cone issue

Actually, you can set your Windows speaker settings (Sound & Audio Devices control panel) to whatever you want, but you must select Headphone in the Creative speaker applet when using headphones.

I have 4 speakers but I set Windows speaker settings to 5.1 but Create speaker settings to 4.1. This allows multi-channel audio in games like Doom3 to work. The Creative driver downmixes the 5.1 into my 4.1 speaker set or to Headphones.