Details: What happened to the audio mixing?

This has been a thing since ME3 but gotten worse to the point where it's begun to bother me. The mix is bad. I'm not sure if it was worse in this or Inquisition but it was noticable in both. I have two complaints. One is 100% a recording/mixing issue and the other is probably technical and game-code related.

1: The vocals are boomy and unfiltered.
Particularly when talking to people such as Varric in DA:I or Harry in ME:A if you have a good pair of headphones or even a standard TV speaker you can hear all the "dirt" in his vocals. I used to play music so I've got those sound-studio buddies who know stuff about mixing and I remember one showing me how vocals are usually mastered and he pointed out that in all professional audio mixing you tend to clean up vocals (not like autotuning) so that all the "grhn" and redundant "hhh" sounds aren't there because if they're not removed it sounds like someone speaking into a microphone and not as your ear would hear it on the street. Granted, you do sometimes meet people who have more fat voices than others, but in Andromeda I found it excessive and distracting at times, and it's something I've noticed post ME2 and DA2. Go back to DA2 and compare Varric's voice for example. Some might be direction but in DA2 he sounds like a smarmy and manly man and in DA:I he kinda sounds like a tired old man because the audio captures all the air in his voice and accentuates it by feeding into the bass. A different example would be Game Informer's interview with Joel MacMillan the art director who has kind of a hoarse voice. Due to their standard equipment and probably no audio mixing it sounds almost strange in the clip: It's often the same in Andromeda where it's both really bassy and too dry. I think the mix is bad.


It's not exactly an issue but I used to think the audio, despite being slightly lower bitrate in DA2 and ME2 was some of the best I had heard in games and especially the introductory scene with Vega in ME3 I remember going "The audio sounds a bit punchy."

Where it gets really annoying is during combat I find. There is simply too many bassy audio clips and during long stretches of combat I find myself getting mentally tired of all the noise and I almost want to turn the sound off. The audio still had a bit of BWAM in ME2 but being muted and less "impressive" it created a much more defined sound picture in the middle of combat and if you compare DA2 and DAI again I can remember clearly hearing every sentence the party yells in DA2 but in DAI my memory always includes loud crash and metal noises. It's a bad memory.

2: Frostbite is a bitch... or something.
I noticed in both DA:I and ME:A, both frostbite games, there's certain menus in which several options can be picked before closing them that makes the same "confirm" noise play, for as many options as you have chosen, on top of each other. OW! Earrape! It happens when you pick skills for leveling up in Inquisition and when selecting a loadout in Andromeda. Equip different guns, then select mods, unselect some, great, done! Let's close the---*RELOAD NOISE*AAARGH, FUCK!

The techincal reason for this seems rather simple to me. It reminds me of when I was designing my first dialogue prompt in Game Maker back in the day. I had tried to make it so you could talk to an NPC which would play its audible dialogue upon colliding with it. The result was that it started playing the audio overlapping itself, one new audio per millisecond. That hurt my ears too. It happened because I had forgotten to make an if-statement telling the game to only play an audio if the audio was not already playing. Apparently BioWare didn't bother to fix this in Inquisition or Andromeda... well, who knows with Andromeda but it is annoying and intimidating to play around with loadouts too much if you're wearing a pair of headphones.

Either way, I think audio has gotten worse since the last 2-3 BioWare games. Do you agree or are you all for more BWAM BWAM BWAM?