Yesterday I joined RD's club race on Nurnurgring with WTCC 2014 cars and my choice was the Honda Civic. Usually I use my soundsystem when playing so I hadn't really noticed any problem with the sound of the car, that is until yesterday. When using the headset, a Steelseries Elite Prism with the usb Dolby Prologic soundcard there was a very dominant distorded, lagging sound most noticable when lifting of the throttle. The sound is best described as a supersonic jetfighter on full afterburn in the distance, I kid you not. First you see the jet swooping past, then seconds after the sound comes.. loud and distorted. My first thought was that the headset was broken and I swapped it to an older Steelseries v.2 but the distorded, lagging sound was still there. I removed the usb sound using analog connections but the problem remained. I turned off the microphone in Teamspeak, turned down the mic volume in Win settings, Realtek settings, Steelseries settings and even the manual shut off on the headsets just in case the surroundings or the wheels sounds was transferred to the headsets but to no avail. Today I did some more testing with the both headsets and also the soundsystem I usually use, the distorted sound is there too but just not as dominant. But it's there alright. The only way I found to get rid of the problem was to turn of ALL engine sound! Any other sound option I tried didn't help. A bit frustrated I swapped car to the DTM 2016 BMW.... and nothing! No sound lag, no distortion, the jet fighter was gone! Swapping back and the jet had returned to haunt me. By now I was quite confident that my headsets, the usb soundcard, the built-in soundcard and the soundsystem was ok. I started to test the other cars in WTCC 2014 and the Lada and Citroen had no problem, however the Chevrolet showed similar issues as the Honda just not as much and dominant in the headset. The Honda had the same if not worse in 2013 and 2015. I didn't notice any issues in any other cars except the Honda, not even the Chevrolet. Next was trying another track so off to Raceway bridge and Laguna Seca... That bloody jet followed my Honda everwhere. I have really no idea what else to test as I cannot reproduce this error in any other car tested so far, except for the 2014 Chevrolet (which wasn't even close to the Honda). It doesn't seem hardware specific, tracks or even common. I'll ditch it for now but quite happy to test more if anyone have an idea.
Tested this issue today. My hardware is Realtek HD sound and Plantronics Gamecom headset so there is a difference. Tried all four cars from the WTCC 2014 series. I could not reproduce the issue listed above, with my hardware, in any of the cars.
I heard a possible solution is to try different drivers for your soundcard. Which sounds like a strange solution to me but hey, it's pretty easy to try out and if it works then great!
Doesn't hurt ti try but a bit sceptic as it was a problem with occured with both the built in and the usb sound card
Yeah, asked around and this was the reply I got. Feels like it should have happened with more than just those specific cars if it was a driver issue. Figured I'd share though, just in case it somehow works.
Kitsune, I changed sounddrivers but that didn't help but it was worth a shot. Andy, here's my usual sound setting. I changed from 5.1 to stereo, put everthing to 0 but as long there is any sound from the engine I get the problem I did a recording hopefully showing what I mean more clearly. First where all sounds are off and then changed to engine only, no other effects. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/299e2kbh322qokv/AAB3EWkw75pixb4XMVE7glxma?dl=0 But all this aside, if no one else is having this particular problem I suggest to put it aside into the "I look into it, eventually" pile on the desk
This problem occured on random cars several times in the past, but it's a hard one to tackle as we couldn't reproduce it on our side. Of course, the fact that it's affecting the WTCC Hondas only is weird but as we learned from some users experience, it could affect any car in the game. Some people even had this distortion coming and going over their sessions. And yes, only very few players got this issue, which is even stranger and makes it even more difficult to figure out what's happening. It's really frustrating to not be able to help you guys. I can only hope it will happen to us in the team so we can look at it at least...