Do you use SL with sound enabled?

Go to the vehicle park when someone is riding around on some vehicle. You will hear volume bursts of a fraction of a second of the vehicle's engine noise. (Right now there's a game there, and you'll hear blurps of the spiders biting the players and so on.) If you are wearing headphones, it might actually make you wince, it's that loud. I know Torley plays with sound off for this and possibly other reasons.

I have been after LL several times over the last year and several months to do something about this. If you have sensitive hearing, are wearing headphones, or are concerned with waking up the neighbors late at night with sudden bursts of noise, playing SL with sound on can be troublesome.

I am sure you would know something like this Huns but not everyone would necessarily so - some sound cards or onboard sound systems come with a sound compression option, that keeps the low volume sounds louder and the high volume sounds softer. My nVidia sound in my other computer has this ability and it is quite useful for mellowing out SL sound, also nice for it's intended purpose of reducing the dynamic range of music for night time listening before bed.

Perhaps there is some program not manufacturer specific that can serve this function for systems that don't have it, like this one of mine, for instance.

My ambient sound is always on apart from the daft 'Wind" noise. Its disoreintating to me for some reason. I also only have streaming music on when im playing music into my own parcel for bandwidth reasons.

Sound on and never any problem. I played the spider game, and it wasn't too loud to me.
I like places with ambiant sound, that adds much to the.. ambiance.

Sound OFF all the time. I do not like hearing badly spliced loop-points in ambient sound. I do not enjoy the barrage of puerile sound clips that seem to be de rigeur in many parts of SL. As a musician I find the range of tastes represented by the choices of music streams in SL to be so utterly depressing as to make me reach for the mute button so often, I just disabled all SL sound. If someone has something they want me to hear, then I will switch the sound on. As soon as it's over I switch the sound off again.

To be honest, I virtually never have the sound turned on in SL. And I live on a plot of land that I know has lovely streaming music.

I keep my speakers turned off and I keep the audio muted in my preferences. I recall being quite confused the first time I went to a dance, as people around me commented on the music selections. So I turned on audio and listened for a few minutes, then turned it back off. Given that the dance animations have no way to sync with the music that is being played, I liked it better dancing with the sound off, and using my imagination for the music.

Why don't I use audio? Because I run a comapratively low-end system, and I don't want to burden my CPU with the additional processing requirements to handle the audio. Also, my computer is located in my family room, where my daughter and my spouse are often listening to the stereo or watching TV. I'd rather not annoy them with more audio, and I hate wearing headphones when they are in the room.

I come to SL to interact with people, not to listen to the waves and the seagulls. The sound effects are no doubt pretty, but I don't need to bother with them.

I often have SL sound on while concurrently running my own music. Add the TV noise in the background and the resultant cacophony surely explains my insanity.