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Engine specific sound should not be heard in cruise


Meyerflyer

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Hello,

 

the thing I'm gonna describe is no new issue, but since day one of the Aerosoft Airbus. While accelerating on and after take off, the wind sound in the VC becomes louder, which is good. But the engine sound can be heard in every phase of the flight, which is not realistic.

 

In RL, while climbing, the wind sound slowly starts to "override" the engine sound and the engines itself produce less whine (IAE) and roar (CFM) with the outside air becoming thinner. It would be so great, if Turbine Sound Studios would improve the immersion here. It would give (at least me) so much more realism flying the Aerosoft Airbus. I'm always a bit sad, that I can for example hear the IAE whine loud and clear even on FL 360, where in RL you cannot here the engines in the cockpit at all.

 

This would be one of my biggest wishes for future updates.

 

Regards.

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Where do you take this information from? Have you flown in an A320 series cockpit yourself already, sitting in a pilots seat?

 

If you asked a real pilot he probably told you he does not hear the engine in cruise anymore. Of course he does not, he probably does not even hear it during takeoff since he wears an active noise cancelling headset which is build to particularly supress the engine sound (and the avionics cooling sounds).

With the headset on you'll hardly hear anything at all anymore, something, if simulated, customers would kill us for. We did this with the F16 in the past and earned a shitstorm for it.

 

Please note that I say "sitting in a pilots seat" because there is a large difference between what you hear in a jumpseat and in the pilots seat.

I was quite surprised how different everything sounded when I started flying airliners.

In my company you first do two days (8 sectors) of observation flights from the jumpseat before the actual line training starts. The plane sounded totally different from the jump than it did from the FO's seat lateron. I can just guess why, but sound dynamics would come to my mind here, being very different when you sit in the middle and about 1m further behind than the pilot.

 

Last but not least, I never really noticed that wind noise becoming stronger during climb/descend. At least not wearing the headset.

I do not want to talk bad about any fellow developer here, so excuse me for not mentioning which type I fly, but there is a highly acclaimed and praised addon of my aircraft available which the sim community took as a reference for many years and this addon simply overdoes the sounds.

What I tend to notice is that most developers seem to develop their cockpit sounds rather as cabin sounds as that is what customers expect to hear. Matching the customers expectations, more often than not, is more important than getting something 100% right in an addon. Just remember the example from the F16.

 

As a last word: I'm not saying our soundset is perfect. There is always ways for improvement, of course there is. All I'm saying is that your expectations, supported by many other developers statements, might be a bit too high here.

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Emanuel, thanks for your detailed comment. Unfortunately I'm no pilot but I applied to a big flight training school (wish me luck 😊). So hopefully, I can talk to you soon as a real pilot. 😎

 

I wasn't aware, that the sound is so much different from the jumpseat to a normal cockpit seat. My statement was and is based on hundreds of videos from inflight and my own flying experience (as a passenger). While climbing you can clearly hear the engine sound fading out on the videos from both the cabin and the cockpit. So I was assuming, that this impression does not play tricks.

 

I think the F16 is a bit different because its engines are probably much louder than a CFM-56 and the pilot is much nearer to the engine than in an A320. But this is also only assumption. I cannot imagine, that you can hear the engine sound in the cockpit at every phase of the flight on the same volume and tone. It simply does not match my experience as a passenger and from the hundreds of videos I saw from airliner cockpits, but I respect your opinion as Aerosoft staff. If you say it is like you said, a have to trust you, because you're a RL pilot.😄

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One really can't use videos for reference.  The microphone from the recording device picks up a TON of frequencies that the human ear can't hear, and when recorded and played that those frequencies affect the frequencies that we can hear. On top of that, all human ears aren't the same either, in fact the variance of "normal" hearing people can be almost unbelievable, especially when one takes into account frequency deafness.

 

We here at Aerosoft have learned the airline sound issue numerous times over. That lesson is that flight simmers want to hear that they expect to hear, not what it realistic and as Emi said, we've had almost rebellions over some sounds that didn't exist because they aren't heard on the flight deck.  So we try to walk the fine line in between realism and expectation.

 

 

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On 2/11/2019 at 11:14 AM, Meyerflyer said:

Emanuel, thanks for your detailed comment. Unfortunately I'm no pilot but I applied to a big flight training school (wish me luck 😊). So hopefully, I can talk to you soon as a real pilot. 😎

 

I wasn't aware, that the sound is so much different from the jumpseat to a normal cockpit seat. My statement was and is based on hundreds of videos from inflight and my own flying experience (as a passenger). While climbing you can clearly hear the engine sound fading out on the videos from both the cabin and the cockpit. So I was assuming, that this impression does not play tricks.

 

I think the F16 is a bit different because its engines are probably much louder than a CFM-56 and the pilot is much nearer to the engine than in an A320. But this is also only assumption. I cannot imagine, that you can hear the engine sound in the cockpit at every phase of the flight on the same volume and tone. It simply does not match my experience as a passenger and from the hundreds of videos I saw from airliner cockpits, but I respect your opinion as Aerosoft staff. If you say it is like you said, a have to trust you, because you're a RL pilot.😄

 

No worries, first of all I wish you the best of luck at the flight school! You will be really surprised how many things are different in real life than they are in flight simulation.

I've been there myself three years ago, even though you might feel you know it all from flightsimming your learning curve will be steep! Very steep!

And everytime you think you've mastered it all you'll start from ground up again on a new topic! Especially once you pass the ATPL theory you'll feel like the king of the world and the moment your first IFR flying lesson starts you'll sit in that plane and start thinking if you have ever even seen all those dials and switches before!

The best example actually are the flight simulators you pass along during your training. Coming from P3D, you sit in that FNPT for the first time thinking it flies absolutely amazing compared to your desktop sim. Once you step up to the Full Flight Sim and do your first takeoff you all of the sudden ask yourself how you could ever have enjoyed that bloody FNPT ;)

And then once you do your practice landings in the real plane you all of the sudden ask yourself how that silly FFS could ever have been licensed as a training device ;)

And finally, once you come back to the simulator for your first recurrence check after the first 6 month of line flying all you think is "what kind of a toy is that? So THIS is what the average simmer thinks is the holy grail? Funny".


Real life is a totally different story from desktop sims, regardless of how many thousands of euros you invest in your gear. BUT it still gives you a very good background and, if done the right way, prepares you very well for flight school!

 

Flying as a passenger again is a totally different experience. The physics involved are hard to understand if you do not experience it day to day and far to complex to explain them here.

As a small example though, whenever I go to the toilet in the real plane I have to put off my headset obviously and then leave the flightdeck.

The first thing you notice is how different everything sounds with the headset off. It is a totally different sound. Now which sound shall you model as a developer? The one with the headset on or with the headset off? Headset off would be totally unrealistic as no pilot would ever hear that during their normal operations.

But even with the headset on it sounds different using different headsets.

I've had a couple of flights in CAVOK conditions where you could see the runway from 20 miles out, where I sat there, flew the plane down to that runway and though "if we'd model a sound like I hear it now, no and absolutely no customer would believe this".

Thus every soundset created for any airliner addon is always more of what a customer would expect to hear than what a pilot actually hears.

 

The F16 was an extreme example, but it shows very well how different customers expectations are from real world. This applies to all aircraft, not just to some. I really like for example A2A's approach to model the effect of the headset!

Looking around on youtube though I see how many people actually use it. To be honest, in my P3D I don't use them very often either. That sound is part of the immersion I feel in the sim. It sort of brings me there. Why turn that off, even though i know it's not realistic?


I could continue this for a very, very long time now, but you see where this is going. ;)

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Thank you very much Emanuel for your kind words. 😊 It's really interesting to hear from a real pilot how big the difference from flight simming to the reallife flying must be.

 

Unfortunately I only applied to the flight school yet so at the moment I'm in a hard learning phase to prepare me the best I can. Today I finally got my date for the basic qualification test which I'm going to have in march. I really hope everything's going well and I will be able to do the second part of the qualification tests.

 

I'll report here after my tests. But only if they are successfull. 😂

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