Quake HD Ultra Quality Sound Pack Remastered 2012

This was a hoax for the damned 1st of April

The Quake HD Ultra Quality Sound Pack Remastered 2012 pack is a project to finally introduce the world to a better and improved aural experience in Quake. Quake came out in 1996, 16 years ago. Back then computers used much inferior sound hardware from what we have today. The Soundblaster could only playback 11kHz sounds, so that was what id Software used for the game sounds of Quake. The soundtrack on the other hand was released on CD, so they could use 44.1kHz for it. However, 12 years ago CD audio was still in its early days, sound engineers vastly improved the capatibilities of audio hardware and especially CD mastering mechanisms. So, just like the game sounds, the Quake soundtrack leaves a lot to be desired for the audiophile's ears.

As a connoisseur of audio architecture and aural design I decided to remaster all the sounds of Quake to give the world an experience like id Software would have released, if only they had the technical options back then.

The Quake HD Ultra Quality Sound Pack Remastered 2012 pack includes all the game sounds remastered to 48000kHz. While working on them I obviously used 24bit/96kHz to be able to use the whole spectral frequency resolution. The human ear how can only hear frequencies up to 48000kHz (known as the Ny-Quist Theorem) so releasing that insane processing quality would have been overkill. Also most soundcards would not be able to play those sounds.

Using the increased fidelity of modern digital sound processors allowed to maximise the audible spectrum of the sounds. With elaborate techniques I managed to squeeze out the last bits of previously inaudible sounds from the rather shabby working material. Thanks to a high gain factor you can now hear highly fragile audio segments in the sounds that previously were cut-off by the high- and low-pass filters of your DSP.

The CD tracks were given special treatment for the Quake HD Ultra Quality Sound Pack Remastered 2012 pack. Not only did I re-implement the amazing Beats technology to increase and fully utilise the lower spectrum (read: Bass!), but the usage of reverbation enhanced the diversity of the samples and phase separation. Try listening to the soundtrack on a proper setup now, it will blow you away, so powerful is it!

Enough chit-chat, here are some hard facts, visual evidence of the amazing quality and of course, samples:

Quake HD Ultra Quality Sound Pack Remastered 2012

  • 249 48000kHz lossless WAV files!
  • 10 HD CD quality Ogg Vorbis
  • The working files took up almost 400 GIGABYTES of space LOL
  • Software used: Sonic Vegas Pro, Goldwave HD 2000, Autodesk Maya, Ardourino
  • Time to resample: 42 hours
  • Time spent manually tweaking the aural parameters: 200+ hours
  • Time to compress to Ogg Vorbis with ultra maximum settings: ~72 hours (3 days!!)

Comparison

Here are some screenshots from the processing software, on the left is the original file, on the right the new enhanced one. You can clearly see how the remastered versions utilise the audio space dimension much better. Also mind the higher fidelity and resolution.

That is player/death4.wav, both times. Unbelievable isn't it.

And here is doors/winch2.wav. You can practically hear the new details just by looking at the analytical spectral graphs:

A random sample from the soundtrack, note how I utilised the available audible spectrum to the maximum:

Samples

These might not sound too great in your browser, try them in-game for the proper experience. You will hear the difference, trust me.

player/death4.wav:

/files/music/Quake%20HD%20Ultra%20Quality%20Sound%20Pack%20Remastered%202012/death4_old.ogg /files/music/Quake%20HD%20Ultra%20Quality%20Sound%20Pack%20Remastered%202012/death4_new.ogg

doors/winch2.wav:

/files/music/Quake%20HD%20Ultra%20Quality%20Sound%20Pack%20Remastered%202012/winch2_old.ogg /files/music/Quake%20HD%20Ultra%20Quality%20Sound%20Pack%20Remastered%202012/winch2_new.ogg

boss1/sight1.wav:

/files/music/Quake%20HD%20Ultra%20Quality%20Sound%20Pack%20Remastered%202012/sight1_old.ogg /files/music/Quake%20HD%20Ultra%20Quality%20Sound%20Pack%20Remastered%202012/sight1_new.ogg

Download

This was a hoax for the damned 1st of April

pak0.pak (111MB)

The Quake HD Ultra Quality Sound Pack Remastered 2012 pack was packaged into a pak file for your convenience. Simply create a new directory named "remakequakesound" in your Quake directory and put the pak0.pak inside. Then launch Quake with "-game remakequakesound".

Alternatively and *highly recommended* is renaming the pak file to the next free number in your id1 directory. Eg if you have pak0.pak and pak1.pak there, then rename this file to pak2.pak. This way you get the full enhanced experience always when playing Quake with no need for any fiddling with weird commandline parameters!

Quakespasm and Darkplaces were tested. Quakespasm works without problems. For Darkplaces you will need to remove any cdtracks / CD music emulation files you might currently have. It always used the id1 cdtracks for me for no valid reason…

Enjoy!

Donations

If you like what I've done and would like to see me do more, please consider donating to spirit at quaddicted.com via Paypal. Otherwise just enjoy.