Okay, so as an update, the sound had steadily decreased ingame until at last I could hear nothing at all as of tonight. This morning at least I could faintly hear things. So I decided to disconnect the bluetooth headphones and see what happened through earbuds plugged into the regular speaker port. Lo and behold, the sound returned. Not nearly so loud as before at all, but at least I could hear it. The in-game voip which I had not been hearing at all lately, maybe people had not been using it, came through - but all muffled and distorted.
That leads me to believe that somehow the game now has code that is doing something different for headphones as opposed to speakers. The dumb (as in no logic circuits) earbuds I have plugged in now are as far as I know no different for the game than any other speakers. But the game "knew" that my bluetooth heaphones were headphones because they tattle and allow apps to do something different for them. I've noticed some people seem to be of the opinion that headphones need to be turned down more so they don't blow out the customers' eardrums. Personally this is kind of one of my pet peeves of late - they're my speakers and my ears, let me decide how loud is too loud!
There is one other setting I noticed, which for some reason was not always showing up. On the audio settings screen, under voip, there is a setting that says playback mode and capture mode. Those can either be default, direct sound, or windows audio session. Earlier when I was messing about, direct sound was not an option there anymore. I had had it set to that before it got reset to default by the patch. Tonight that is back as an option, but I don't know what the difference is between a windows audio session and direct sound. Direct sound is as I recall part of directx, which is why I was choosing that. I don't know what choosing something different does or why you would, but swapping between them did not fix my problem. I had messed with that because I remembered that when the voip patch first hit, I could not hear anyone at first, and changing settings there fixed it.
Actually, that's another area I'm not quite clear on. I frequently mute and disable my microphone, and only enable it again when I know I am going to be talking on it for some reason. The first night of voip it seemed like I was not being allowed to hear voip unless my microphone was on, too, which I would consider a bug. There have been patches since then, though. That might no longer be the case, but in between the patch that might have fixed that and the one that dropped last I stopped hearing anyone on voip anyway. My unit uses teamspeak exclusively. I would rather try and use in-game voip for a number of reasons but you have to use what people are using.
I didn't want to bring up teamspeak because I thought I had eliminated it as a factor in this, but I may as well also admit that I have a volume plugin on teamspeak that lowers game volume when people talk. When the game was blaring before, this worked fine. It still seems to be working as designed when I have it going. But I have disabled it, stopped teamspeak, made sure nothing is running related to it in the task manager, and rebooted, and still had the low audio. Tonight, when I switched to dumb earbuds and could hear the game again, my teammates were loud and clear, and the game was low but I could hear it, with the volume going down and then back up again when people talked. When I disabled the volume control plugin it worked as expected. The game volume was the same as it was before and did not lower when people talked.
I'm going to try and pursue some more information on how windows handles communication devices now, because that or in-game code is probably where the problem lies given that it is connected to the use of the bluetooth headset with the game. It's just very frustrating because the headset is working perfectly for every other game I play and every application that makes sound. I was kind of hoping someone else had encountered this and could make suggestions.
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