Audio quality degradation

[fentras]

All media has been copied from #bug-report post in the official Discord server

For some users audio can be noticeably muffled (lower quality noticeable in the mid and treble frequencies). The behavior is unknown and it seems to happen randomly on both Windows and Linux on the latest Steam version and also develop branch as of 7f7d166. Possibly related to this issue SFML/SFML#1813.

First, there were tests between 1.92 and 2.xx versions and the newer one introduced quality issues:

Then comparing to the original file:

Testing original file and the latest develop branch myself on a Linux machine with kernel 6.0.0-1, the audio is muffled in the game:

2022-10-16_01-28-53.mp4

Doing the same but now connecting and disconnecting an external DAC, the audio issues disappear:

2022-10-16_02-30-50.mp4

The last example might bring a solution. I assume refreshing playback devices while in the game removed audio quality issues, because when an external DAC was connected the audio quality suddenly became normal and was kept like that even after switching back to default playback device.