News

Audio in Skyrim Special Edition Worse than Original

While the recently released Skyrim: Special Edition may be visually superior to its vanilla predecessor, released five years ago, reports suggest that its sound is of a noticeably worse quality to the original game.

“The vanilla game has sound assets (other than music and voiceover) in uncompressed .wav format,” redditor LasurArkinshade  writes. “The Special Edition has the sound assets all in (very aggressively compressed) .xwm format, which is a compressed sound format designed for games. This isn’t so bad, necessarily—it’s possible to compress audio to .xwm without significant quality degradation unless you crank the compression way up to insane levels.”

“What did Bethesda do?” LasurArkinshade asks, then answers: “They cranked the compression way up to insane levels.”

LasurArkinshade even includes a sound file comparison. Listen for yourself:

There’s good news for audiophiles, though: the issue can be fixed by importing the audio files from the original Skyrim into the Special Edition.

“I extracted my original Skyrim Sounds.bsa, packed it with 7zip and installed it with NMM in SSE,” says reddit user TI36X. “Seems to work fine.”

“There are two folders in the bsa,” TI36X explains. “Sound and Music. Just pack them into an archive and install by NMM [Nexus Mod Manager]. Someone just uploaded a bsa extractor on the SSE nexus that works for this.”

If you want to try this for yourself, the BSA extractor can be downloaded here.

Ashley Allen

Disqus Comments Loading...

Recent Posts

Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5090 Possible Price Revealed

According to a new report, the GeForce RTX 5090 GPU will be very expensive. It…

9 hours ago

AMD Krackan Processor with 6 Zen 5 and Zen 5c Cores for Budget AI Laptops Leaked

A new AMD processor in the form of an engineering model has been leaked in…

9 hours ago

SK Hynix Begins Production of First 321-Layer NAND Chips

SK Hynix has claimed to be the first company to mass-produce 321-layer NAND memory chips.…

10 hours ago

Trust Gaming GXT 609 Zoxa 2.0 PC Speakers

SOUNDS GREAT – Full stereo sound (12W peak power) gives your setup a booming audio…

14 hours ago

PowerA Wired Controller for Nintendo Switch

Special Edition Yoshi design Ergonomic controller shape with Nintendo Switch button layout Detachable 10ft (3m)…

14 hours ago

Logitech G Saitek PRO Flight Rudder Pedals

Fluid Motion: These flight rudder pedals are smooth and accurate that enable precise control over…

14 hours ago