audio quality

[Nia ll McCaffrey 1413456]

Hello,

New pilot here, and maybe I'm not doing something right. I've managed to install xsquawkbox and connect to a vatsim server. I could hear the ATC and hear and see other planes around the airport, but the quality of the audio was really awful. I could barely make out what was being said, and in most cases, it was just mumbling. Everything sounded fuzzy and indistinct, and even with the aircraft engines turned off and listening closely it was mostly unintelligible and unplayable.

 

I didn't see any options in xquawkbox for adjusting the quality or compression of the audio. Can anyone help? Swityching between wave and directsound didn't do anything. Even my own mic test and readback is affected, I sound like I have wrapped layers and layers of duct tape around my mic.

I'm used to TeamSpeak and know the issue isn't with my headset.

[Don Desfosse]

I'm not a XSB user, so can't help with the question if there are any tweaks that can be done in the software. However, audio quality is something that VATSIM grapples with regularly (daily).

 

The biggest contributors to audio quality issues are horrific (lack of) quality microphones/headsets that are used by many members, members having too much background noise compared to their voices, members not even using a headset (e.g. on a laptop, etc.), and an outdated voice codec in use on the network (though that likely has more to do with latency/lag than quality -- honestly the quality isn't that much worse than real world if decent headsets are in use).

 

That said, VATSIM is working on developing/deploying an updated voice codec that should help some. Now if we could only get folks to use better quality headsets appropriately (e.g. think something on the order of $10-15 USB headsets) , that would help immensely.