How to fix robotic, slow and distorted sound on Rocksmith 2014 PC

Note: This is an old article, so install paths etc may be different. I recommend using RSMods to manage game settings and it generally makes life easier. I will keep this article up as it may be useful for debugging issues.

I recently reinstalled Rocksmith 2014 on my PC because of an SSD upgrade. When I started the game I was haunted by slow and distorted sound that made the guy on the intro sound like an angry robot.

I had this issue when I first got the game, when it came out and I managed to fix it by switching to my on-board soundcard, rather than my Asus Xonar D2X. After a while I got fed up with switching cables around and managed to find a fix deep down in a forum. When I came to look for that forum this time round I could not find the post but luckily I managed figure out what I did last time so here is a quick fix that hopefully should work for you.

The fix

Start by making sure Rocksmith 2014 is not running.

Navigate to your Rocksmith folder within your Steam folder, this is usually located at:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Rocksmith2014

Unless you have installed Steam on a different drive; then it should be a case of swapping the drive letter.

You should see a file called ‘Rocksmith.ini’, right-click this file and open it with Notepad.

Now change the ‘1’ on the line that says:

‘Win32UltraLowLatencyMode= 1’

to a '0'.

Usually by default this is set to ‘1’.

You should then have something that looks like this:

‘Win32UltraLowLatencyMode= 0’

Now save the file and start up the game. This should fix the issue. If it doesn’t trying experimenting with different vales for the ‘LatencyBuffer’, I’ve found that 4 works very well with my Asus soundcard.