Me too, I hope they keep the reverb/echo effects too. Maybe even improve them.
It's not necessarily about loudness either. That you can manage yourself just with the volume. It's more about how accurate it is not just compared to the environmental sounds, but the extent to which the tonality of the different sounds share likeness with the real thing.
One thing PD has been noticeably testing out is environment and body sounds.
I'm not an audio person but this is how I hear:
Their current (past) engine lacks micro and macro detail. Tyre screech was basically one sample that varied with 'force' instead of how many wheels are locking and direction. Car body lacked some muffled sounds that we still get from vibration like suspension and gearbox. Some games exaggerate these rattlings way too much, but having this detail that we can't get fully in a natural way is important.
Doppler effect, reverberations, and presence on macro scale. When in a grid, you can basically hear 3 other cars not your own (engine limitation, likely). and their audios are not placed in space if they are far from you. Even with competing sounds, I can hear certain louder cars driving in a distance.
But I guess that would require a volumetric, physical audio engine to simulate, or at least approximate. These are things that would help those "clinical" recordings in silent garages with microphones placed and filtered, to regain some of the "behaviour" we notice as spectators in races for the cameras that matter, and to have a more lively representation of when inside the car.
Increasing/improving the sample notes would help it further.
I never thought GT sounds sucked or were wrong, just that they 'deformed' artificially and were too boxed/clean.
But with these latest developments, it's clear that their approach to audio is getting with times. I just hope they don't make cars sound like you'd be driving with no windshield, windows and bonnet.
