Same. I have no idea where sound is coming from most of the time. I might be crazy but I actually think its gotten worse between updates.

i find headphones make a huge difference

yes, for me hp's make a big difference too

Good headphones help, but the sound is still pretty bad.
Search the qlive forums. You'll see a shitload of other people have this problem.

Dont really have any probs with headphones

well what headphones u suggest.? They might give me a clue.

The only "good" thing for the moment (not for the opponent though) is that sometimes u can hear the mh pickup from miles away, which always makes me thing "Am I supposed to here that?"

the sound in ql is shit, no matter what headphones you will use

shit sounds

sounds good to me dunno what yall are going on about.

Is it qlive's sound that bad

Yes.

I find it hard to differentiate between "levels" e.g if I'm at the bottom sg @ dm6, and I hear keel clonking around, I can't easily tell whether the enemy is ambushing YA or at the bridge.

Also, you get these "wtf" moments like in q4 where the enemy just suddenly appears behind you, without ever betraying as much as a single footstep.

Could always be my clogged-up ears though, and the fact that 90% of the time I play ql I cba to use headphones :D

second this.

also people, stop going 'headphones help', got the same setup as i did in Q3, where it worked fine fine fine.

no I can easily hear the enemy behind you with openal in q4 but crouchslides makes no sound ;)
I still think openal is superior for locating enemys. I hope ID will bring openal into ql but I doubt they will.

Yeah I know crouchsliding doesn't make a sound, and I never played q4 with openAL, Realtec Ac'97 FTW! :D

The problem is that in q3dm6 the second floor footsteps sound different. They should definitely fix that.

It's Qlive. In dm6 if you're not a foot away from the rocket, you're not gonna hear the pad hit.

The devil is in the details...Plz fix it!

i was bitchin about sound some time ago, now i got used to it i guess :x

no vertical orientation :-|

s_separation maybe ? I have no probs with that.

The cvar doesn't exist in QL :/

One thing that makes it very difficult to understand where sounds are coming from is that qlive does not distinct if the sound is coming from a point in front of you or from behind.
In Quake 4 (OpenAl 1) for example, when a sound comes from behind, it sounds very different then when it's coming from in front of you.
This is far more important than a vertical distinction, just try Quake 4 and see how easy it is to orientate via sound. In Q3 the same problem exists, but most don't notice it because they are playing since years and got used to it too much map experience to get fooled by sounds.

The second problem with the ql's sound is that it became very hard to guess distances by the loudness of the sound. I think there is less variation in the volume than in Q3, which makes it more difficult to guess the right distance.
Also, sounds seems to be going through walls were they shouldn't and sometimes it gets suddenly cut off when some guy walks into another "zone" of the map, even though he is close.
Those problems don't exist in Q3 (or at least aren't that annoying), so I hope this will get fixed.

Yes, the sound placement is just fucked up. I heard the enemy in weird places, specially notice this in dm6. Q3 was more accuarte. Dumb how they keep adding more new bugs than fixes to an already fixed game (CPMA/OSP).