I've been aware of this for a while now, but I'm not sure if it's just the way a game is and how the audio is programmed, if there's some sound card setting I need to adjust, or if there's some sort of mod patch. I noticed it for the first time in Half-Life and then whilst I'm replaying Return to Castle Wolfenstein, it happens in that, too. Basically, if you're facing a certain direction, presumably the source of the audio, you hear a character's speech fine, but if you turn to face a different direction, even ever so slightly, the audio becomes much quieter, which makes it difficult to hear what's being said. It's worse during the tram ride in the original Half-Life as the tram is constantly moving different directions. You've basically got to face inside the tram rather than sitting back and watching the ride from the front. Even then I'm not sure if facing inside the tram is guaranteed to work.

It can't be the speaker setup as both retro PC and my main PC are using a 2.1 setup - 2 stereo speakers and a subwoofer. It wouldn't be much of an issue if a lot of these older games had a subtitles option, but a lot of them don't, unfortunately.

Has anyone else encountered this? Is it a case of having to deal with it or is it something that can be addressed? Thanks.