The release of CS:GO is impending and you can feel it all across the scene. With tournaments picking up the game more and more the future is looking bright, albeit for a few problems. Mainly that roughly 50% of the pro's consider the game not as competitive or playable as previous titles. A large portion of them mentioned the sound being virtually worthless in the game, offering little to none support or information while it did play a crucial part in previous titles of the franchise.

Valve/Hidden Path have now come to realize that the sound from the previous titles was an intrinsic part to the game play and therefore have announced audio updates in their latest blog: Sound Spatialization.

In the blog the developers explain the advantages and disadvantages for the current cross-fading set-ups for each games using some in-depth graphs. For those interested the graphs looked as follows: What the audio used to be like in the CS franchise.
In this informative graph you can see that while the nearly ancient 1.6 had only one audio algorithm for all configurations CS:S and CS:GO both offered different combinations for different hardware. The problem was that these configurations were seemingly off for some people, leading to audio that sounded nothing like CS:GO's predecessors. As a problem solver it has been announced that options will be unlocked for each and every user to configure their own audio set-up and algorithms. This should offer both a better standard of audio for starting players as well as providing experienced players with the toolset to customize their audio exactly the way they like it, and therefore resolving any audio problems that existed to date.
What the audio will be like in CS:GO.