I was looking to update my collection of Jeff wav’s for dumb editing stuff when it dawned on me how natural the EQ is in Infinite this time around.
If you pull up back to back from the games, 4 is sorta tinny, 5 has sort of a stadium/boosted effect like it’s coming through massive drivers, and Infinite is effectively just a clean balanced voiceover mix.
Initially I would prefer 5’s mix for certain lines, but I played through a whole set of them and on second thought, the clean high fidelity of Infinite is better I think overall.
Which makes me wonder about sound design here: In previous titles the mix makes it feel like an announcement over a loudspeaker or through something electronic, to indicate a separation from the immediate events.
So if the AI lines are very clean, Jeff and the other announcers are natural sounding… MAYBE that’s why he’s not in BTB. Because let’s say you had the H5 Jeff playing for medals and the new announcers talking with clean/natural audio, maybe slightly boosted over Jeff when they overlap, you’d be able to easily separate alerts. Yet it would probably be jarring when there isn’t a lot of action.
Clearly I’m just falling down a rabbit hole of sound design