Is OpenAL/EAX just a matter of taste?
I've been playing Thief 1 for years and recently started tinkering with spatial sound settings as I heard it makes the game feel a lot more immersive.
OpenAL, OpenAL Soft, DSOAL, HRTF profiles... there are many different guides and ways to do it. What they all have in common, to me, is that they don't actually make the game feel better.
I appreciate the reverb in some areas. The echo of voices in the basement. The sound of my footsteps bouncing off the walls as I run across a big room.
But all too often I find areas where the sound doesn't seem quite right, or somehow lower quality or lacking the clarity I had with those settings off. In the end, it feels intrusive, like I'm playing with a distracting filter.
Is it fair enough to just say that people hear things in different ways, and for some of us, EAX just isn't agreeable? Or am I uncultured and still missing something huge?