I finally got around to trying the remaster and I've noticed two things in particular:

Sound cutting out or not playing at all:

• I witnessed during one of the first splicer encounters, the character was animated as if yelling and pounding on a door, yet not a single sound
• Muted / missing ambience

After some googling, I came across someone suggesting that I drop the MaxChannels value under FMOD section in bioshock.ini - I found this odd because this suggests bumping it up to 128. As I was already at 128, I dropped it to 64.

While I was in there, I also set bEAXEnabled to True and then configured the executable under ALchemy. Things sound good now, but I'm curious if I'm really getting any EAX effects - does anyone know if that option in the ini makes any difference or if its just a legacy option from the original release?

To further complicate matters, I came across this:

EAX is disabled and changing the ini does nothing. Original game uses OpenAL routed through FMOD. Don't use Alchemy because all that does it convert DirectSound3D to OpenAL. Converting OpenAL to OpenAL is pointless.

Is this accurate? And if so, what is the purpose of this next part?

1[ALAudio.ALAudioSubsystem]
2UseEAX=False

Should I instead enable this? I'm so confused!

(system in question is running windows 10 with an external SoundBlasterX G5)