Sound Proximity Bug?

[Morlanthe-agamaggan]

I have the box checked to make sound effects more realistic and fade away/in depending on distance. However, even small sound effects and - more importantly - voices do the same but to the extreme. For example, an NPC could be talking and I’m standing right next to them. If I turn to face away from them - still right next to them, mind you - their voice fades completely. It seems my audio is somehow set to only hear things right in front of my character. Is this a bug?

[Theodas-hyjal]

Voiceover volume has been messed up for a long, long time. I think it worked fine in WoD.

[Lilus-archimonde]

Known issue. Think it might have been related to audio drivers?

I’m honestly not sure. Fixed it myself months ago, but I can’t for the life of me remember what search term I used on Bing to finally find a solution.

EDIT: Ok, I THINK that I may have found the issue.
If I did, then it’s a Windows issue. Don’t know if it affects Win10, but I know for a fact that my issues started up following an upgrade to Win11. At the time of my upgrade, I wasn’t playing WoW, so I didn’t even know there was an issue until I returned this past April.

Settings>System>Sound
Under the header for “Output” click on whatever device is your primary output. Shoud be within a drop menu, in between the option “choose where to play sound” (clicking the arrow on this option opens and closes this drop menu) and the option to “pair a new output device.”

If memory serves me on the matter, I had to disable the option for “Spatial Sound.” Make sure that’s turned off. Having that on will override in game settings. It’s intended for headphone users mainly. Connecting a headset tends to screw with that setting however.

Mind you, the path I gave you to get there is assuming a Win11 system of course. If for whatever reason you cannot locate it, try looking up “turn off spatial sound” on Bing/Google and go from there.

Stop surround sound for Stereo

Hey there, This type of thing tends to be a configuration issue within Windows, rather than within WoW itself. WoW can take advantage of surround sound (whether that be a physical 5.1 or 7.1 system, or a virtual surround sound software when using just 2 speakers), but it’s Windows that tells WoW how to render the audio. In Windows 10 right-click your Volume icon in the system tray and go to Spacial Audio, if that is turned on try turning that off. If you have any virtual surround sound softw…

EDIT 2: In fact, I just looked a bit deeper in that thread, and that’s indeed the thread I found on the matter which led to me fixing my own issues.

Stop surround sound for Stereo

I generally don’t like to necro threads, but as I was running into the issue myself I wanted to give an update. I was gone for about nine months from July of last year to April 2022. When I came back, I was experiencing what felt like surround sound despite having stereo speakers. In the time period between I did upgrade to Windows 11. Sure enough, some of the previous solutions listed didn’t work. With a bit of trial and error I managed to fix it. If you’re on Win11, head into your system set…

[Rattlebones-agamaggan]

Thank you! Did not know this was a known issue and I believe I got it fixed. Much appreciated!

[Obsidiant-blood-furnace]

My spatial sound was already turned off and I have this issue still. Any other ideas?

Edit: I turned Mono sound ON and it fixed it. It also fixed my character’s voice sounding a mile away.

[Milanolith-feathermoon]

Thank you so much. This was driving me crazy.