They’ve done something degrading to the ATC voices. With SU6 they now sound all buzzy and distorted. I think Asobo were tying to mimic the sound of ATC voices through the cockpit radio. But unfortunately it sounds horrible. The high-frequency buzz which they have added is not only painful to hear when I turn up the volume, but it also makes it much more difficult to understand what the ATC are saying.
Asobo, Please can you revert the ATC voices to what they were before SU6?
Yeah it kind 'a hurts a bit.
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Isn’t there a setting to remove the VHF filter?
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Hopefully it will be reversed to the old situation soon, this hurts my
ears
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My understanding is that the radio gets fuzzy with distance but clears up closer you get to transmitter location.
Unfortunately turning off that setting does not get rid of the awful buzzing on the ATC voices which is introduced in Sim Update 6.
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Oh yeah the atc went from worse to much worse now .
My ears are killing me .
Simulated radio degradation has been an optional feature since release.
Since SU 5, the ATC and other plane voices have been made to sound as if they were coming out of a small transistor radio speaker. What I think they have done is reduced the dynamic range of the audio in an attempt to mimic a two way radio, but they overdone it.
Kinda reminds me of a really old landline telephone audio.
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Sounds to me like they removed the lowpass filter on the audio, and the voice audio is clipping. IRL the audio gets rolled off above 4KHz (because the channels are spaced 8.33khz apart, you can only have an audio bandwidth of half that) and that reduces a lot of hissing and static and the overall harshness of the sound.
Yes, there is now harsh digital clipping, plus a lot of treble-frequency audio energy that shouldn’t be present.
Distortion is a necessary part of the effect anyway, it was way overdone but tamed by a bandpass until now. Now it sounds like they shifted it or lost the lowpass portion so it sounds even more like FM than before. The (almost) FM-typical squelch chirp always did its own to make it not sound like AM, now it sounds just terrible.
The distance simulation is done by adding noise and a fast (-ish) fading effect that shouldn’t be there at high altitudes and over plains and the distortion seems to be cranked up too, which is not correct behavior either. This was done pretty well in my recollection for ATIS (the “signal” really stuck gradually out of really bad SNR when you got closer) in IIRC FS2002, then dropped again in FS9 when full ATC was introduced.
Comment asking if we all don’t have other problems in 3…2…1… 
We may or may not.
However, these buzzy clipped ATC sounds will be heard constantly, especially during IFR missions in FS2020. It will drive people nuts having hear this unnecessary tinnitus-inducing distortion all the time. It can and should be simply hot-fixed back to the way it was before SU6.
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I’m surprised not a lot of people have notice this on their reviews of this update, it was one of the first things I noticed and it’s killing my ears, it really hurts. I hope they fix this soon because I’m considering not playing until it’s fixed.
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You could just turn the ATC volume down (or off) until fixed, too. I agree it sucks but not sure it’s worth not playing at all.
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You are probably right, maybe it’s a little bit of a overreaction but high pitch noises really drive me crazy, paired with the TBM 930’s (my favorite plane to fly) master warning not being able to be stopped really frustrated me today.
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Yep. Same here.
Hello everyone,
Could you please provide recordings of this distorted sound. Thank you for your help!
I don’t have too many recordings from before sim update 6, just this fragments where you can hear ATC compared to now.
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Interesting, after hearing the them side by side, it sounds like the distortion is happening after the lowpass filter now. You can tell the distortion was always there, but before the harshness was reduced due to the filtering.
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Quoting myself there and slightly OT, the fading effect isn’t quite right but yesterday I was approaching LSZR from the southeast, which means you’re pretty close to the airport but there’s a mountain in between and it seems that effect is actually controlled by line-of-sight calculations including the topology, which is pretty neat. IOW, all the needed stuff to make it perfect is already there, they’d just have to tweak the sound a little and change/remove a few samples (for example, there’s one correct squelch chirp, which is more like a pop on AM and the wrong, FM-like sounding).