Talk of sound has changed a lot in patch 15, so today we're going back through all of the headsets to decide if there are any serious differences to before, as well as some other situations that seem to have changed with the update.

Including a fascinating case study at the end with this weird spot on Customs where an out-of-place occlusion zone is causing strange results.

What?

So to start with, let's take a look at the regular movements.

With this wipe, we've had 3 new regular headsets added, the Comtac 5s, the Comtac 6, and the Safariland Liberator, as well as 2 special sets of Comtac 5 and 6, but these are designed to work with the XFIL helmets specifically.

I have not tested these XFIL Comtacs on their own, but from what I've seen around, they are basically the same as the regular ones.

For once, Tarkov is actually now somewhat intuitive here, and the Comtac 6s come out as the best headset on all metrics, with the GSS-H being the worst.

When running underweight, you can be heard up to 61m away with the Comtac 6, and 54m with the GSS-H.

No headset is 47m, and then the rest of them just lie somewhere in between.

As before, walking is very similar to running on its maximum distance.

I do want to caveat here though, that although walking is technically audible at these ranges, it is quite a bit quieter.

So if you're moving, or there are other things going on, like firefights or scavs shouting, then you absolutely can miss the audio cues from both walking and crouching, even though you are technically within range.

These numbers just represent the maximum hearing distance under ideal conditions, basically when you're not moving at all.

Walking at minimum speed shaves off around 10m from the theoretical maximum, and it's only when we get to crouching again, even at max speed, that we see some serious differences in the audibility of steps.

This remains about the same as last time, with 15m being the absolute maximum distance over which you can be heard, and slowing down to a crawl only takes off about 1m from that range, so most of the time you're better off just fast crouching.

From here I stopped testing every single headset because it takes an eternity, so I was only using the Comtac 6s for the top of the range and the GSSHs for the bottom, and so when just overweight into the orange, the running distance goes up to 64 for the Comtac 6s.

This isn't that much more, and interestingly, walking and crouching whilst mildly overweight were also the same as being underweight.

The next set of tests had a really interesting result at the end.

The regular movement actions came out to about the same as last time, such as the foot crunch sound when spinning on the spot being 23m, prone movement being audible up to 28m, and jumping at 62, one of the loudest sounds in the entire game.

But the ambient reduction of the headsets actually starts to set apart what we used to think of as the good headsets and does change up the list slightly.

From my testing, the Comtac 6, the Comtac 5, the RAC, and the Safari Land all came to the most ambient reduction, tested in factory because the background noise is more constant there than outside where the wind fluctuates.

After this, the XL, the Tac Sports, the Razer, and the Comtac 2 of all things seemed pretty good, and only after all of these did I finally reach the Comtac 4s, which appeared to be bundled with the Sword Ins and the M32s.

Of course, the GSSH ended up at the bottom, as it is noticeably more noisy than the others, and only slightly better than not wearing a headset at all.

But because of its technical distance range, the Comtac 4s are still okay, its poor ambient reduction though does put it in the middle of the pack at best.

I'll put a short clip here of the factory ambient with all the headsets so you can have a listen for yourself.

A few other tests, but nothing has really changed on, showed that ADS distance was still around 22m, and magnification, fire mode, and zeroing changes are just under 30.

So on to the next section, occlusion, or how much sound gets muffled when coming through designated sound barriers such as between floors.

VSG seem to have turned up the muffling effect of these barriers, meaning that it is harder to hear players through them.

On this particular location on Streets of Tarkov, one of the entrances to Pinewood Hotel, you can hear clearly that when the door is open, it's the same or very least very similar audio as when you're outside.

There are no actual occlusion layers between the players in this instance, although the game does register a difference between being inside and outside.

This difference is quite hard to hear with footsteps but is much more obvious when shooting, as the shot sounds are dramatically different inside to outside, as well as when they're occluded, which we'll see in a second.

So you can see from this just how hard it can be to hear somebody walking around at normal speed inside a building with the door shut.

I even put on the Contact 6s and I can barely hear the other player.

You do have to be careful when relying on this though, because openings like broken windows, for example, will stop this effect from working.

As soon as the door was opened, the occlusion layer goes away instantly and things go back to the way that they were before.

If you're crouch walking inside, it's almost impossible to hear somebody moving, even with the best headsets in the game and being right next to them.

Running around is clearly audible, but as usual, staircases have strange properties.

In this instance, I believe it is affected by the fact that the upstairs windows are broken, so running on the floor above allows our PMC standing outside to hear the indoor player much more easily, as the sound comes through from the upstairs instead.

In this instance, the stairs almost act like a sort of latch kind of effect, i.e. the occlusion properties stay with the character until they move into the next zone, being the grand floor or the next one up.

This means that you can be in the same place, the stairs landing in this case, but have two different audio profiles depending on where you were before.

If you started off downstairs, you can be on the landing and sound occluded.

If you started upstairs, you can then be on the landing, but now you sound not occluded.

It's a very weird situation.

This isn't the case everywhere, as we'll see in Factory in a moment.

I did a bit of testing in the underground subway as well, and you're also very, very quiet down there, unless you're running at full speed.

The occlusion zone here seems to fade in quite well, and broadly performs as you might expect.

As a reminder, the range chart that we looked at earlier is mainly for looking straight forwards and partly to the sides.

There is still an angle dependency to this, so from behind, somebody can be quite close to you and even running, and the player listening will not be able to hear.

This appears to be a hard cutoff, as the sound suddenly kicks in, even for high range sounds such as jumping and sprinting.

I did try to replicate the zero audio grenades that I've seen reported all over the place, but so far I was unable to do so, even dropping them down through different occlusion zones.

So in Factory, we have the same type of behaviour as we saw in Pinewood Hotel, which adds an occlusion layer when the door is closed.

I found that the office staircase audio to actually be fairly good in general, and shows how the vertical audio can work when it's set up correctly.

When inside and down a staircase at the same time, sounds become very muffled, including shots, and this appears to fade in as we move our sound source down the staircase, which is very cool.

If somebody's down in the basement, it's pretty much impossible to hear them running when you're above ground, but upstairs, instead, they can be heard relatively easily.

Unfortunately, other than the basement, the sound is very binary on these staircases in the other floors, and at the top again, this might have something to do with the fact that the skybridge is open.

I also noticed that when you run along the office corridor, I'm pretty sure that the footsteps get louder and quieter as the player passes the windows, and these are broken, so it should be propagating sound out of them.

However, I couldn't get this effect with gunshots, so maybe certain sounds act this way and others don't.

One of the parts of the current system that I don't like is how hard it is to distinguish verticality when the sound is not occluded.

The muffling of a sound plays very strongly into giving the listener clues as to where it might be coming from, but the indoor audio on the same floor sounds extremely similar to indoor audio on any other random floor, so long as the sound itself is not occluded by doors or walls.

For example, someone running in the office corridor does sound much the same as a player running along the ground floor, especially when the different distances are accounted for.

So now we're going to look at a really odd occlusion layer on customs.

This clip popped up on my Twitter feed from MsDunk, and I went to replicate it because it was quite interesting, so let's check out the short clip first.

Alright, so I figured this was probably just a bug, and the other player's footsteps just simply weren't registering, but this only seems to be half of the answer.

While I was setting up the scenario, I was very surprised as to how quiet the other player is in this situation just generally.

Bizarrely, if you shoot, you can clearly hear that it's as if you're getting the indoor audio whilst being outside.

As soon as the player steps over the boundary of the concrete ramp though, everything goes back to normal.

So this is obviously a little bit weird to start with.

Now, in the replies under the original clip, MsDunk mentioned that she was wearing GSSH, which as we know now, gives the least reduction to ambient sounds.

So if you're moving at the time, it is quite possible to not hear the other player on the other side of this phantom audio zone.

Now obviously, you can hear the other player arrive on the left hand side of the shack pretty easily, even with GSSHs and even whilst moving.

As soon as you leave the concrete audio section, all the sound goes back to normal as we said before.

I was actually unable to find a way that this player could just show up there with no sound.

So it appears to me that this situation was both an actual bug in keeping the opponent quiet when they shouldn't have, but it was very likely contributed to or maybe even directly caused by this strange layer that just simply shouldn't be there.

Overall, my takeaways are that the game audio does sound more immersive and makes more sense than it ever has done when it works.

You do have to be super careful when playing around buildings as people can be exceptionally quiet, especially if there are doors or floors between the two of you.

And even small details such as broken windows have a massive impact on the audio profile that you're giving out.

However, there do seem to be many instances on clips floating around the internet where the audio is not working as expected.

So if BSD can iron out all these bugs and get everything to be a bit more consistent, then I actually think the audio could be in the best state it's been in in ages.

Practically speaking, the audio ranges that we knew from Last Wipe are broadly the same, with a reshuffle on the best headsets with the Comtac 6 now coming out on top.

This one will probably get extremely expensive, so the Comtac 5s, the Safariland and the RAC are all relatively similar in terms of their performance.

So for more guides this Wipe, go and check out my armor and weapons videos for level 2 traders that are out now.

As usual, a big shout out to all my patrons, and as always, have fun in your raids.