When Doris Burke speaks, it’s when the game is at its most confusing for me. The moment she begins talking, random noises that you otherwise don’t hear in the game just blast into focus. Perhaps the thought was that because Doris has to appear to be on the sideline, noise has to be piped in, but it just does not sound right.

 

 

Maybe it’s a bit hard to hear in that video, but where are those whistles coming from? Why are the fans whistling? And also there’s just this general crowd chatter that eats into her audio. It becomes even more noticeable that these sounds are really out of place once she stops talking and the normal crowd returns to being the main focus. 

 

 

Again, on some level you may not notice it in these short clips, but I have faith that if you play NBA 2K a lot and have heard Doris talk, you notice it. The crowd and the mix of all the audio changes in some substantial and odd ways once she’s done talking. She’s in her own universe rather than just part of the broadcast.

How the rim sounds in NBA 2K is probably the most popular random audio topic that crops up. In short, people don’t like how the rim sounds. I’ll show off the first set of dunks here as comparisons:

 

 

LeBron James is a powerful dunker and DeMarre Carroll is not. But just look beyond the crowd noise, players involved, commentary and all that and just listen to the rim. They sound way different. Now it’s not to say that’s inherently a bad thing that NBA 2K’s rims sound different from real rims, but there’s still something that seems off.

 

Here’s another example:

 

 

Operation Sports member “23” was a big inspiration for this article in the first place because he’s pushed for changes in these areas for some time. He more or less summed up the rim sounds as hollow, and I can agree with that. It’s not that the NBA 2K folks didn’t capture real rim sounds, it’s just that maybe the mic placement was weird or they just did not get many versions of them, and then fixing or adding to them always falls off the priority list during the development cycle.

 

Still, it’s telling that people have tried to set out and change some of these rim and net sounds in the past.

 

 

Now I’m not saying that video is a perfect comparison to strive for in the real NBA 2K (and PC guys will mod just about anything), but you can at least appreciate the amount of variety at work there. At the end of the day, dunks sound different in many arenas because the mic placements change and arenas have different acoustics, but the point is it would be nice to have those sorts of elements in play here. After all, the developers did work like that with the PA announcer(s), so let the rims have their moment to shine.   

Now, I did not talk much about ramping up the intensity from the regular season to playoffs, but that one feels more self-explanatory for the most part: make it louder, have more extreme emotions and have more going on in the crowd from a visual perspective. In addition, we didn’t talk about general crowd reactions because obviously people just want “better and smarter” crowd reactions -- and maybe crowd noise that is not fighting with the commentary to be heard.

 

The point of all this is that NBA 2K has tons going for it in the audio department, the game would just get that much stronger if it could improve upon some long-term legacy issues and bring you even deeper into its five-on-five experience.