Overall sound quality goes down when altering volume/pitch?

Hey Brian,

Thank you for your prompt response. So we finally found the cause of the "gobbling" and the "struggling mosquitoes" sound: the objects were not moving synced to the listener, we just changed the Audio Listener settings to Fixed Update and that seems to have solved the issue.

But we still have the sound quality issue, when the Engine sound is too loud and there are other engines sounding next to the listener, other sounds start sounding choppy and low quality. Is this normal behavior? Is there a way we could solve this?

Thank you for your help.

Yeah, listener and engines SFXs are attached each to physics game objects.

So, at the start of the race, all of the cars are sounding their engines at the same time, which makes the engine sfx sound too loud (because is the sound 12 times stacking up in itself). Then, the race count down starts sounding (this is a 2D sound on a different bus), and because of the stacked up engine sound, the 2D sounds are sounding choppy and overly saturated, low quality. When all of the other engines go away, the sound quality goes up again, because we don't have all of the engine sounds saturating the volume.

When lowering the engine volume, the issue is avoided, however, we need the engine volume to be louder because when all of the other cars are gone, the player engine is too quiet to be distinguishable.

I'm guessing we need some kind of ducking or logic that lowers the volume when a bus gets too loud?

Thank you for your response Brian.

I set the voice limit to 4 and it seems to do the trick. However, now I have some cars in complete silence when passing by them; is there a way to rearrange the active sounds based on proximity to the listener?

Thank you

I was referring to the SoundGroupVariaton children of the MasterAudioGroup that get deactivated when the bus arrives at its maximum limit of voices; I was asking if there was a way to activate/deactivate those objects based on their closeness to the listener while retaining the bus voice limit.
We just tried to separate the sounds into multiple buses but the issue was still there, I'm guessing the main problem is that THAT many sounds stacking on each other are saturating everything and chopping it out?

If we lower the volume of each car, the issue is no longer there, it sounds great. However, when a single car is passing by, is barely audible.

Also, we have the bus configured to stop older voices when reaching the voice limit. That's why we have 11 sound group variations but only 4 are active. We were wondering if there was a simple way to tap into this deactivation system and make it deactivate excess voices based on distance instead of oldness.

Oh... Actually we weren't using a Unity Mixer asset... But we just set it up.
So, the Engine Mixer group gets very high (around 8dB) but wasn't clipping at all. So we added the compressor as you suggested and it works as a charm.
It seems that it really was easier to fix this on Unity's side so I apologize for wasting your time but thank you very much for staying with us and helping us until the end to solve this issue!