ULTIMATE Modern Warfare 3 Audio Guide! - Must-Have EQ and Game Settings for MW3!!

hey what's up everyone it's Joe from gadri Tech and today we're going to talk about Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 purely in the context of audio there's a couple minor changes from the older Modern Warfare 2 but I do want to make sure that you understand what those changes are to give you the edge while also setting appropriate expectations on how this audio engine actually performs now I also have custom EQ presets for a huge range of headsets headphones IMS you name it um I'll explain all that in the second half of this video but trust me you do not want to skip ahead because the beginning part of this video is probably the most important thing to understand in order to hear footsteps as best as possible as always if you do like what you see don't forget to like And subscribe I'd love to see if the next video I'm really trying to grow the channel a lot and your support means everything so thank you so much and with that being said let's kick it off and talk about the game so I'll be honest this while I do like some of the improved mechanics on Modern Warfare 3 compared to two this is easily the most disappointing Call of Duty uh launch in a long time the Press has like beaten it up right so because this should have been a DLC uh to the Modern Warfare 2 and the way it's packaged and built with this headquarters app and all this crap that they're trying to pull it's obvious it should have been so um if you're here there's a really good chance that you spent $70 on the game like me and you're trying to get the most out of it so let's talk about audio settings now the first and most important preset you want to change is set your audio mix to the home theater audio preset for multiplayer now I tested this a lot footsteps are just as loud at the same distance there's no volume Advantage with the headset preset but the tighter dynamic range of the headphones preset means that ambient noise like cars Birds water dripping it's all louder and this increases your noise floor a lot which when you do that actually makes it more difficult to hear footsteps because now there's other volumes that are just as loud competing with what you're actually trying to hear one other change you can make in the game and this is the most important thing to take away from this video is there's a perk called the the bone conduction headset perk which you unlock when I believe you're level 26 it makes a massive difference in your ability to hear Footsteps in game more than anything an EQ will ever give you simply because the EQ customizes the frequencies you hear but the bone conduction perk makes more stuff appear sooner I can't fix with EQ audio cues or sounds that don't exist yet so use the bone conduction perk the audible noise of walking and I test this in custom games okay the AUD audible noise of walking footstep sound is only 10 meters away from the enemy or when the enemy is approaching you you won't hear them until they're within 10 m when you factor in the tiny amount of latency on top of that people can literally walk right up to you and you'll barely hear it the running distance is closer to 20 M and it's affected by objects like ground material or walls that all changes what you're hearing and how far or soon now these ranges are not only short but there is a considerable volume drop off even at very close distances you know like 2 m versus 8 m and when you add in the fact that this ADHD inducing uh game of constant noise and chaos is playing on top of the footstep sounds you're trying to hear and all of that noise is happening at all times good luck forming any kind of consistency with awareness because there's a lot of chaos going on bringing me back to the bone conduction perk which is so much more than what the game states which the description says to reduce combat noise which is uh a lie at best um even in custom games when there's no other sounds present the bone conduction perk actually increases the audible range of all footstep cues by about 10 m the walking distance as I mentioned before is closer to 10 m but with the bone conduction per you can actually hear people 20 M away just walking when they are running instead of 19 to 20 M now you can hear them 30 plus M away and if they're jumping you can even hear them 40 plus M away so you can see why this perk is incredibly important now naturally Call of Duty has a covert sneakers perk which is a new thing and it's kind of like having a 247 Dead Silence I think everyone's going to be using that and you can unlock it by doing the daily challenges which for some reason they put tons of unlocks and progressions behind super annoying but I think everyone's going to be using that so some of these settings and EQ stuff it may be useless depending on how effective the covert sneakers are um but definitely look for that cuz while you do want to hear your enemies coming you also don't want to be heard if you're going after them now what makes hearing your enemy even worse in this game is how inconsistent everything is sometimes you hear stuff sometimes you don't uh the game will say oops too bad I forgot or no we have too many things going on I'm not going to play that footstep sound you probably wanted to hear there's a thing called ambient occlusion and ambient occlusion is how audio cues are impacted by objects in the game so if you're in a building how much audio drop off should you expect through a wall or two walls or a floor trees um Hills things like that so it turns out random objects are creating barriers to hearing footsteps as well not just walls but like even a signpost outside which was like literally a piece of wood on a stick um if that was between me and my other character cuz I bought uh this game on M multiple consoles and platforms so I can do this this testing um I couldn't hear any footsteps it's like this little stick was a soundproof barrier so ambient occlusion will get patched and improved it always does when call in Call of Duty through time but that's another more of a strategy tip don't put yourself behind a certain object and expect that object to not interfere with what you're hearing inclusion exists and it can negatively impact how fast or soon you can hear someone coming now there's also a fun little bug where if you crouch walk or strafe perfectly in a straight line on certain stairs you won't hear any noise the enemy won't either I tested this a lot in game check this out it's hilarious that you can be going up and downstairs right next to someone and not make a single sound so if you're camping at the top of a step don't always expect to hear someone coming that will likely get fixed too but in the time of this video um I thought that was a hilarious bug uh I don't know what they were thinking but here we are so now that we know what settings to use in the game we also have to set some realistic expectations the best we can do is clean up the audio a bit so footsteps don't have to compete with other sounds as much obviously with the way the game engine works I can't make sounds appear out of nowhere and if you uh have your own preferences on listening or different audio cues are affecting your game this isn't the solution that's going to fix everything um but the way I tuned this now I played on so many headsets all the ones behind me and more I used in this game um over the past few days because I wanted to make sure that one I could provide usable presets for every model that you may have uh while also you know delivering something that works for a lot of people in a lot of games so the most important thing you can do when you customize EQ for footsteps is adjusting the base performance so even if you don't care for any of the other changes or you're really happy with the way your headset sounds and you want it to be a little bit better you usually want to address the base region so deep base helps with immersion and explosions but there's if there's too much of that your drivers in your headset IM whatever it's competing there's noise trying to compete with the footstep sound and if there's too much deep base and explosions and things like that those footsteps just don't stand out as clearly so in the simplest sense what you want to do is reduce your base below 80 HZ as much as you can um as long as you're okay with losing some of the immersion keep the 110 to 125 Hertz region stronger and then help reduce the the 250 htz region which is like your upper base that cleans up the base a lot and has um the most noticeable impact on footstep awareness so when it comes to EQ there are so many options out there um I have a lot covered in this video but if you play on PC I strongly recommend using still series sonar um it's part of Steel series GG I will have a link in the description below or use equalizer APO with the piece extension sonar may have more features than you need and it takes up more space but it's incredibly easy to use and full of game presets from steel series that works with any audio device you don't have to buy a steel series product so whatever you have connected will work now equalizer APO with peace is incredibly light on system resources it's also free um there's some great amazing features on that but it's less graphically intuitive than sonar so it's really just a matter of preference we're going to start with sonar though because I want to show you why I recommend this so much so if you're a PC player we'll focus on Sonar first um and I'll also show you how to change it because that to me is really what uh separates it from basically everything else and then after that we'll talk about atos and what platforms you can use all these on then we'll get into dacks and you know headset specific settings all right so I'm going to have links in the description as I said for all the eqs that are applicable now um with sonar this is my Modern Warfare 3 sonar tune and I did things a little bit differently than my Modern Warfare 2 one however that one still works uh pretty well for Call of Duty so you can always try both and see if you just happen to prefer one over the other again this is a result of testing on dozens and dozens of audio products to get to this curve and the reason why it's built this way is because we can leverage the sliders underneath to make the most out of this tomb so this shouldn't be a surprise I took away subbase but not all of it because I don't feel like the game should be neutered so much that you lose all immersion purely in terms of footsteps and I also don't want to boost the upper frequency so much that it's painful in ear wincing if you will causing you to turn it down or frankly just find the sound profile offensive so with sonar and again now sonar by the way if you see this uh share icon you can import other people's presets so install sonar first I'll have a link in the description then below that I have a link for this EQ you don't have to type any of this in anymore you can click it and it'll automatically import my tune into your sonar and you're good to go so for those of you who are trying to replicate this in um equalizer APO or any other parametric EQ program I'm going to go over this but I also have the settings pasted in the description below to help save you time so the low shelving minus 5 DBS at 45 Hertz that cuts away a lot of the deeper base but not all of it I lifted the um base boost a little bit higher than normal it used to be like 115 Herz but I noticed between 110 and 160 HZ um the footsteps just sound a little bit higher pitched not like a lot we're talking literally a very tiny window but everything just seemed a little bit thinner sounding on the new Call of Duty for me I don't know if it's just my own you know listening has changed or whatever but this worked best for me so 130 HZ 4 dbel lift with a Q of 1.6 which is how narrow we address it this is optional now um a lot of gaming headsets have strong upper base like stuff from Sony stuff from Razer uh these Brands boost the upper base which can create a little bit of muddiness to the sound and I wanted to take some of that away the other byproduct of this is when you boost this much base um in the 130 HZ region you are going to be lifting that upper mid base a little bit as well as a byproduct of that so I wanted to clean this up this is 250 HZ minus 2.7 DB with a Q of two I'm going to get into why I did it this way in a moment now these notches that I created are specific to ear fatigue sounds in the game clicking sounds um air noises it's just after a lot of testing I found that if I created these two notches it helped um one make the footsteps stand out more and two and it got rid of some weirdness that I didn't like with just constant like clicking sounds so an example like this 5.75 khz one or 5750 if you're typing it into sonar minus 4 DB with a Q of8 this is the sound of the countdown in Search and Destroy so if you're concerned with that like stopwatch clicking set sound or when the game is about to expire this sound reduces that clicking sound and I focused very narrowly because I didn't want to take away other details from the game so that helps it's still audible but now it's not as loud I also found that the way this audio is mixed that boosting two this sounds really specific but I promise you after a lot of testing this was like targeting it as close as I could uh 2,140 HZ or 2.14 khz 2 dbel lift at 707 Q which is a nice wide broad lift in that region I'll cover these two dots in a moment because they're optional to use so then you go into the 4 KZ region which this actually made a more of an impactful difference on footstep sounds than monare 2 did for me so 3.2 dbel lift 4.07 khz or again if you're typing this in you would type 470 with a Q of 3.5 this upper uh frequency adjustment you you notice it's a high shelf you can change these in sonar so if you're making this yourself click on high shelving at 10 khz and up 1.5 dbel lift with a Q of uh 707 so in sonar you have the ability to broadly lift and reduce each general area of this tune the reason why I say this is this tune is designed to work with everything you own uh on PC for Call of Duty specifically by not drastically altering the sound profile of the device you own it's simply cleaning up the base and getting rid of a couple nuances in the upper frequencies while also subtly lifting kind of like the detail area of the footsteps and qes that you'd want to hear now if you have a headset that has way too much base you can grab this slider down here and just reduce it and if you look I'm preserving a lot of my curve the curve that you want I'm I'm just increasing or reducing it so this is where you can fine-tune the sound profile to your liking if you find the base too much lower it if you find the Bas too weak boost it the same happens with the mid-range if the mids seem like they're completely lacking you can boost that whole area and look what that's doing to the mids and upper midrange as far as frequency response goes so again start with this base tune and then use the sliders to see if you can kind of fine-tune it the way you want the treble if I pull this it's going to lift the treble now the way this is working with the high shelf I'm not lifting it as much it start it really kind of just focuses on the lower frequencies be careful with the treble change because a lot of gaming headsets are really strong in the 8,000 htz region that's why my upper frequency which is like your Sound Stage adjustment um starts above 10 I didn't want to lift the 8 khz too much so if it sounds really sharp and like sparkly on your headset and it's kind of painful just pull this down or reduce this High shelf uh a bit to zero or even uh negative so the other two dots I want to tell you about these guys right here you notice the que is set to seven that's very narrow these are your Search and Destroy arm disarm beeps I analyze the crap out of this game I promise you I spent so much time way more time analyzing than I should have compared to playing um but these two sounds make the beat for arming and disarming much louder so I have a second preset specifically for Search and Destroy but if you just import this one all you have to do is you know boost the frequencies however you want you could do seven I think I usually did five DB um but and I changed the wrong one let's fix that because I obviously modified the wrong one here so let's go back and I'm going to ring this right back down to where I was before I think it was 2.2 I'll reset it but on the other one here let's go to 5 DB so you can see the difference yeah I was doing 5 DB before but doing this it still kind of preserves um the other stuff that we were targeting in the game but now the beefs stand out even more so um just use the preset for that and this will get you going on Windows if you're able to leverage sonar the other stuff at the bottom I have everything turned off you can mess with spatial audio as well on Sonar because using Sonar prevents you from using Dolby Atmos so if you need to use Dolby Atmos I'll show you that EQ in a moment but just keep that in mind with equalizing APO which is coming up next um that allows you to use Atmos so if you want this exact curve with the ability to use Atmos just use equalizer APO now a couple quick housekeeping things first just to help um hopefully simplify this as much as possible for you on PC I already recommended uh to use sonar if you don't want to use sonar use uh equalizer APL if you're using Atmos and PC you're not overlapping and doing all of these together it's one or the other and obvious obviously none of of these are perfect for everybody we all have our different preferences and you may have an audio product that frankly doesn't work with this tune and you want to customize it um and that's okay so if you're playing on Xbox I highly recommend using Dolby Atmos to do custom EQ not only does Dolby Atmos help with uh spatial cues but it has a pretty decent 10 band equalizer and that'll apply with any device that you pair to it if you are connecting something like the Astro mix amp either whether it be the the A40 version or if you buy the A50 and you have uh the Dack built into that for Xbox I have um Astro specific EQ presets later in the video tune for those now if you're using the Astro A40 Style mix amp on Xbox but you're using an eost headset or drop or vzr bar dnamic whatever is plugged into it do not use the EQ preset for the A40 or A50 just because it's for the MixAmp for example doesn't mean it applies for for other headsets and headphones you want to use uh set it to flat or uh a signature sound whatever you want that's pretty much flat on uh Astro and then use the Dolby Atmos tomb now on Playstation this gets a little bit more difficult I usually don't recommend using an astro mix amp on Playstation because little guys like the creative uh G6 exists and that's a significantly better Dack option it has a 10 band equalizer built in so I would will have pictures of 10 band equalizer presets which is uh Universal to any Dack uh or software that uses a 10 band equalizer that includes razor uh jbl's Quantum series um things like that so there will be specific EQ presets for certain popular models um if I left yours out it's only because the sonar preset or the atmos preset is better than using its own software the other thing to consider is things like the Corsair hs80 which I also tested extensively has no onboard EQ and corsair's IQ software has a pretty bad equalizer implementation for all Corsair products compared to Dolby Atmos so you might as well use the Dolby Atmos tomb which sounds significantly better on PC and on Xbox if you uh somehow got a Corsair headset to work so uh hopefully that didn't make things too confusing again we'll start with the universal stuff first use those where you can and if there's a specific tune to your model later uh maybe switch to [Music] [Music] [Music] that [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so that wraps up the video hopefully you like the idea of this sound signature not being too aggressive on the treble or sucking too much base out and losing the imersion audio isn't everything make sure your in-game settings are set appropriately as well so you can hear footsteps as soon as possible but also use uh sound tactics and don't expect the game to be 100% reliable of audio cues a niky preset can't make sounds appear that weren't there in the first place we just kind of fine-tune the stuff that comes in so if you found it helpful don't forget to like And subscribe I'd love to see at the next video I'm really trying to grow the channel a lot into the holidays I'm looking forward to 2024 and uh I hope you all have have a good one I'll see you next time [Music] bye

Channel: GadgetryTech

Views: 190,411

Keywords: modern warfare 3, mw3 eq setting, mw3 equaliser setting, mw3 equalizer settings, mw3 footsteps sound, mw3 sound settings, mw3 sound eq, mw3 hear footsteps, best settings for mw3, best settings for modern warfare 3, best audio settings for mw3, best audio settings for modern warfare 3, eq preset for fps, best audio setting for mw3, best audio setting for call of duty, call of duty modern warfare 3

Id: oBv4FeiRd5w

Length: 23min 16sec (1396 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 13 2023