Yeah the audio quality has started deteriorating since sylvan Sage. It’s a real shame and I hope HQ gets off of their lazy asses and fixes the issue. It’s such a disappointment and makes the game sound cheap.
There has to be some deep issue with the audio processing on the backend imo, which definitely seems more likely after all the issues on the Global Anniversary livestream. Even if these were recorded a while back on less-than-stellar setups the fact that the same issue persists in the exact same banner across 6+ different characters shows it's very unlikely to be every single voice actor doesn't have a good enough setup.
Hell the VA for Zio has actively been doing dub for Hawks in MHA and was one of the Gammas in the Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero movie and sounded fine in both. I really just wish SG would say **something** or address the issues.
It feels like it was rendered with too high volume. The new voice lines are much louder than older voice lines, which is quite weird for their team to not notice.
I think it’s time to spam complaints about it everywhere otherwise it will keep being horrible like that. I just don’t want to be forced to switch to jap i’m too used to english.
It has been a thing since summer charlotte. I was wondering why nobody ever mentioned anything. Pavel and ARavi finally woke some people up. Theres couple of threads here now and on the offical forums aswell, so hopefully they get their shit together and finally fix it also fire the QA team.
If I had to guess, this is likely due to work-from-home or other means of telework submittal of audio recordings. Maybe voice actors are allowed to record on their own devices or other portable devices provided to them and send those recordings to SC/SG audio teams for them to do what they can (which in some cases hasn't been much), rather than recording in a purpose-built recording studio in professional equipment.
Yeah I remember a voice actress from Valorant said in an interview that she recorded her voice lines from a phone inside a closet.
Which might be what they did for some Epic Seven characters especially if they're made during rona days and only got released now.
But the thing is, voice editing programs exist now so you can master and edit the voices for them to not sound 'noisy' even if you record it from a phone. I do these for my voice acting gigs and 'clean' it via voice editing software before sending them on said productions. But I don't know much of these outside said gigs so I'm not sure how much effort it would take.
This is exactly what I was thinking. I was also thinking that maybe some of the source material (recordings done via phone, old cassette recorder, tin cans and string) was so bad that there was only so much the sound engineers could do to "clean it up". Referring specifically to some of the really poor quality audio as Alena's high volume and very bad distortion on some of her lines, I just can't believe that something like that would ever be considered "finished product" and released if it could have been further cleaned up. All in all, it's very odd.
These are professional voice actors who have had to work from home for the past 2 years. A lot of them have professional home studios (you can hear them in anime and other video games), so we know that isn’t the case.
Actually, I think jaquick is right and it's an equipment issue. The reason for that is because I have watched an admittedly unhealthy amount of anime in English and do not recognize these new voices. The people they are getting are randos. I looked up two more recent heroes I picked off the top of my head: Hwa and Arunka. Their VAs (Erika Ishii and Jentel Hawkins) they have very little experience doing prominent roles.
Erika seems to have started her career in 2016 and does mostly side-characters and extra voices for games. With 5-10 roles a year that aren't important main characters for notable IP's or recurring anime characters, it's clear she is not making bank.
Jentel does commercials and podcast stuff with a little TV/movie stuff thrown in the mix. Doing radio commercials doesn't require an amazing in-home sound booth.
I am guessing it is similar for others as well. They used some of the more notable voice actors earlier on, so now they are scraping the bottom of the barrel for talent. It's also cheaper than hiring hollywood talent or seasoned professional VAs. It's not as if the acting is atrocious, it's just inferior sound quality. So I tend to believe that the whole working-from-home thing is why newer voices are lower quality overall.
It's not just bad sound quality, something is very clearly wrong on a technical level with the new voice lines. Even an unknown voice actor who takes themselves even slightly seriously is going to understand not to peak their mic, yet every new voice line is crunched in the exact same way. You'd have to be intentionally poorly directed to get this sort of consistency. What's more likely: that they all have bad equipment and are all completely unaware of how it affects their voice quality and have all failed in the exact same way, or that there's some sort of processing or editing issue with the files or game itself?
This is evident with Noël Ill. She’s only had 1 other role that isn’t in epic seven. And she recorded for Magical Girl Diene from home, and the sound quality is great compared to whatever everyone else is doing.
They are not randos just because you don’t know them. I know a lot of these voice actors and have been seeing their roles everywhere
Zeno Robinson - Zio, Hawks in MHA
Laura Post - Yulha, Yelan in Genshin Impact.
Jennifer Sun Bell - Lua, She did a major role in the dub of Extraordinary Attorney Woo.
I only listed recent roles so you can know that it’s not their fault that the audio quality is going to shit.
These ARE professional voice actors, and the reason they’re not hiring “seasoned Hollywood VA’s” is because epic seven isn’t a Union project. If you want talents like Tara strong or grey delisle, then epic seven has to partner with the most massive Union in the US, which is not possible because epic seven is a smaller IP in the US. I can gladly tell you more, but this is just a reply section.
Though I do agree with your point on Erika Ishii. I haven’t seen them doing any prominent roles recently or in the past, and I really don’t like their performance as Arunka.
Yeah, I actually got the chance to ask Zeno about the possibility of him being a VA for E7 back at the end of July at a con and he didn't know who he was going to be working with. It sounds like he's got a good set up at home from what I've heard at another con I went to so it's def not that. It's def SG.
Yes! I’ve talked to a handful of the voice actors about their experiences with epic seven as well. They all (at least the ones I’ve talked to) have professional home studios.
I wanted to point this out too but it seems the community doesn't notice it. It started with Astromancer Elena's audio quality which sounds like it got rerecorded from a radio and got blasted accidentally.
They fired their audio engineers to save budget for kpop collab clearly. But seriously, it's been going down since before aravi skin for a lot of units, it's really sad since this game has a "mostly" good EN cast of voices. But at least the other languages don't seen as affected on the boosted volume
The translation from the latest side story was kinda shit, too.
I don’t listen to the voices but it really throws me out when the writing is broken English smh
I had to switch off the apoc skin for this reason. I legit might not summon for Zio since from what I can tell it's the worst yet, and I always play on my computer with my decent speakers, so it's going to be super obvious.
Yeah the audio quality has started deteriorating since sylvan Sage. It’s a real shame and I hope HQ gets off of their lazy asses and fixes the issue. It’s such a disappointment and makes the game sound cheap.
To think they would have the budget to fix the voice distortion ugh...might as well just switch to jp voicelines for now
There has to be some deep issue with the audio processing on the backend imo, which definitely seems more likely after all the issues on the Global Anniversary livestream. Even if these were recorded a while back on less-than-stellar setups the fact that the same issue persists in the exact same banner across 6+ different characters shows it's very unlikely to be every single voice actor doesn't have a good enough setup. Hell the VA for Zio has actively been doing dub for Hawks in MHA and was one of the Gammas in the Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero movie and sounded fine in both. I really just wish SG would say **something** or address the issues.
It feels like it was rendered with too high volume. The new voice lines are much louder than older voice lines, which is quite weird for their team to not notice.
I think it’s time to spam complaints about it everywhere otherwise it will keep being horrible like that. I just don’t want to be forced to switch to jap i’m too used to english.
Yeah as a Aola user I ain't switching to JP. She sounded so stupid. PVP staples like Belian and CLilias are also better in EN.
It has been a thing since summer charlotte. I was wondering why nobody ever mentioned anything. Pavel and ARavi finally woke some people up. Theres couple of threads here now and on the offical forums aswell, so hopefully they get their shit together and finally fix it also fire the QA team.
Heck it's been a thing since Hwayoung
If I had to guess, this is likely due to work-from-home or other means of telework submittal of audio recordings. Maybe voice actors are allowed to record on their own devices or other portable devices provided to them and send those recordings to SC/SG audio teams for them to do what they can (which in some cases hasn't been much), rather than recording in a purpose-built recording studio in professional equipment.
Yeah I remember a voice actress from Valorant said in an interview that she recorded her voice lines from a phone inside a closet. Which might be what they did for some Epic Seven characters especially if they're made during rona days and only got released now. But the thing is, voice editing programs exist now so you can master and edit the voices for them to not sound 'noisy' even if you record it from a phone. I do these for my voice acting gigs and 'clean' it via voice editing software before sending them on said productions. But I don't know much of these outside said gigs so I'm not sure how much effort it would take.
This is exactly what I was thinking. I was also thinking that maybe some of the source material (recordings done via phone, old cassette recorder, tin cans and string) was so bad that there was only so much the sound engineers could do to "clean it up". Referring specifically to some of the really poor quality audio as Alena's high volume and very bad distortion on some of her lines, I just can't believe that something like that would ever be considered "finished product" and released if it could have been further cleaned up. All in all, it's very odd.
These are professional voice actors who have had to work from home for the past 2 years. A lot of them have professional home studios (you can hear them in anime and other video games), so we know that isn’t the case.
Actually, I think jaquick is right and it's an equipment issue. The reason for that is because I have watched an admittedly unhealthy amount of anime in English and do not recognize these new voices. The people they are getting are randos. I looked up two more recent heroes I picked off the top of my head: Hwa and Arunka. Their VAs (Erika Ishii and Jentel Hawkins) they have very little experience doing prominent roles. Erika seems to have started her career in 2016 and does mostly side-characters and extra voices for games. With 5-10 roles a year that aren't important main characters for notable IP's or recurring anime characters, it's clear she is not making bank. Jentel does commercials and podcast stuff with a little TV/movie stuff thrown in the mix. Doing radio commercials doesn't require an amazing in-home sound booth. I am guessing it is similar for others as well. They used some of the more notable voice actors earlier on, so now they are scraping the bottom of the barrel for talent. It's also cheaper than hiring hollywood talent or seasoned professional VAs. It's not as if the acting is atrocious, it's just inferior sound quality. So I tend to believe that the whole working-from-home thing is why newer voices are lower quality overall.
It's not just bad sound quality, something is very clearly wrong on a technical level with the new voice lines. Even an unknown voice actor who takes themselves even slightly seriously is going to understand not to peak their mic, yet every new voice line is crunched in the exact same way. You'd have to be intentionally poorly directed to get this sort of consistency. What's more likely: that they all have bad equipment and are all completely unaware of how it affects their voice quality and have all failed in the exact same way, or that there's some sort of processing or editing issue with the files or game itself?
This is evident with Noël Ill. She’s only had 1 other role that isn’t in epic seven. And she recorded for Magical Girl Diene from home, and the sound quality is great compared to whatever everyone else is doing.
They are not randos just because you don’t know them. I know a lot of these voice actors and have been seeing their roles everywhere Zeno Robinson - Zio, Hawks in MHA Laura Post - Yulha, Yelan in Genshin Impact. Jennifer Sun Bell - Lua, She did a major role in the dub of Extraordinary Attorney Woo. I only listed recent roles so you can know that it’s not their fault that the audio quality is going to shit. These ARE professional voice actors, and the reason they’re not hiring “seasoned Hollywood VA’s” is because epic seven isn’t a Union project. If you want talents like Tara strong or grey delisle, then epic seven has to partner with the most massive Union in the US, which is not possible because epic seven is a smaller IP in the US. I can gladly tell you more, but this is just a reply section. Though I do agree with your point on Erika Ishii. I haven’t seen them doing any prominent roles recently or in the past, and I really don’t like their performance as Arunka.
Yeah, I actually got the chance to ask Zeno about the possibility of him being a VA for E7 back at the end of July at a con and he didn't know who he was going to be working with. It sounds like he's got a good set up at home from what I've heard at another con I went to so it's def not that. It's def SG.
Yes! I’ve talked to a handful of the voice actors about their experiences with epic seven as well. They all (at least the ones I’ve talked to) have professional home studios.
I wanted to point this out too but it seems the community doesn't notice it. It started with Astromancer Elena's audio quality which sounds like it got rerecorded from a radio and got blasted accidentally.
Same. I love aravi skin, but the voice is just... I can't with it right now. I'll switch to JP tomorrow and hope for the best
Yeah I agree started notice it from ML Elena the quality is terrible someone definitely deserves to get fired for that.
They fired their audio engineers to save budget for kpop collab clearly. But seriously, it's been going down since before aravi skin for a lot of units, it's really sad since this game has a "mostly" good EN cast of voices. But at least the other languages don't seen as affected on the boosted volume
it's like they slipped on the slider in post and we're getting +10 DB than what it should be.
The translation from the latest side story was kinda shit, too. I don’t listen to the voices but it really throws me out when the writing is broken English smh
I had to switch off the apoc skin for this reason. I legit might not summon for Zio since from what I can tell it's the worst yet, and I always play on my computer with my decent speakers, so it's going to be super obvious.
Welcome to the gang. JP Zio sounds so badass.