Dark Souls Montage - Comparison of the broken PC stereo sound to the intended mix

UPDATE: On December 20th a patch was released for the PC version of Dark Souls which fixes these issues. The game will now sound as intended for everyone without having to go through the steps below to do downmixing.

--- Below is the old video description which no longer applies to the new patched version ---

Stereo on PC is broken. I've confirmed this across 3 computers and 6 sound devices, THIS AFFECTS EVERYONE. The 5.1 downmixed clips sound identical to stereo on 360 and PS3, it's what the game is supposed to sound like.

Unless you have a sound card capable of downmixing 5.1 to stereo you will only be able to hear a compromised version of the game sound as demonstrated in the clip. Ambient sound is not only much lower in volume, but entire elements of it are gone. Some areas are affected worse than others, but the ENTIRE GAME is affected to some extent.

Dark Souls has almost no music and relies heavily on ambient sound to create mood. It's slow paced and gives you plenty of time to take it in. This makes the issue more serious than it would in any other game. Unless modders become aware of this it's unlikely to ever be fixed, making it only possible to experience the game as intended on PC either with 5.1 or a sound card capable of downmixing 5.1 to stereo.

WORKAROUNDS

How I know what I have?

To find out what sound device you have, go into the control panel and find the sound settings. If you've never been in the sound settings, they can be found by first pressing "Hardware and Sound" http://i.imgur.com/dS758.jpg then "Sound" http://i.imgur.com/kFrkz.jpg and there you'll find the list of audio devices available on your machine. The one with a green check mark is the one currently being used http://i.imgur.com/8fcum.jpg

What will enabling downmixing do in other games or programs?

In most games and programs such as music and movie players enabling downmixing will not have any noticeable effect. In games the results vary wildly. Console ports generally sound better, while games made for PC will sound the same, or worse. Examples of games where downmixing has terrible results are Need for Speed Shift 1 and 2 and Serious Sam 3. In these games the volume balance becomes way off as some sound effects will become twice as loud as they should be.

In other games such as Alan Wake and Dragon Age 2 the stereo track was done very poorly as in Dark Souls, so in them you will instead get much better sound quality. In general though I'd recommend switching back to stereo without downmixing once you know that you won't be playing the game for a while. That's how I run my machine most of the time. I only start experimenting with downmixing if I notice the sound in a game being a bit worse than I think it should be.


For Creative cards:

Go to the Audio Console and change to 5.1, and then you change to headphones in the same drop down menu. This will keep Windows at 5.1, but have the output be stereo. It's done this way to enable virtual surround technologies for headphones to work, but if you disable all the virtual surround stuff like CMSS you get simple downmixing instead that sounds good over speakers.

For Asus cards:

To work around the problem with Asus cards it's pretty simple. All of their internal sound cards, even the very cheapest ones, have downmixing controls on the first page of their driver settings. http://i.imgur.com/yn1RO.jpg There are two drop down menus, the top one "Audio Channel" controls what Windows and all software believes you have and the bottom one "Analog Out" controls output. Set the top one to 6 channels (5.1) and the bottom one to 2 speakers and you'll get 5.1 downmixing like in the video.


Realtek:

This might work http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost....

Info Pyide sent me on Realtek:

"The "speaker fill" setting unnecessary for realtek audio, it actually does the opposite (or says so anyway), it's for sending a stereo source over a surround setup: http://i.imgur.com/2tAbG.png

Choosing 5.1 and unchecking the extra speakers does apparently resolve the issue for stereo setups / headphones though. All that's needed."

VIA:

No known workaround yet.

Nvidia:

Same as Realtek.

AMD Radeon:

Unknown. Same as Realtek?

I'll add and update more instructions for others as they come up. If you've got some info that could help I'll gladly update the video description.

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