Solution: Issue with directional audio in game

Hi all,

A few months ago I posted a thread here asking for advice on how to solve a problem with directional audio. In summary, my issue was this:

Whenever I point my camera away from an NPC that is speaking, their volume drops dramatically and I can barely hear them. The same issue occurs with in-game ambience, such as a waterfall. When I point my camera away from it, it sounds as if it’s far away. If I look back at it, it sounds like it’s right in my face.

Several people offered solutions, including the possibility that the issue was a result of addon interference, but today I happened upon something on Reddit (shout out to Sylaz on r/wow) that worked for me. Apparently, this is caused by a Windows sound setting.

The solution I found was as follows:

  • Go to Settings > Sounds > Speakers (whichever ones you’re using)
  • Look for “Audio Enhancements” and set that to “Off”
  • You may need to restart WoW for it to take effect (as once I disabled this, I had no sound on my WoW client until I relaunched the game).

The volume of speech/sound effects now seems to properly scale with my character’s proximity to NPC/environment in question, rather than the position of my camera. Hopefully this helps anyone Google searching around for a solution as I did. Cheers!

14 Likes

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.