See Griffith this is what I don't get. You can hear that iRacing and PCars both have superior sound to GT, at least to my unprofessional ear it sounds that way. You obviously have a far greater understanding than me. What I understand is that iRacing and PCars budget is about equivalent in relation to GT, of the amount of money the falls out of Kaz's pocket when he goes to buy a hotdog at a race weekend.
All the theory in the world does not explain why this is so. The only thing that explains it, is that sounds aren't a priority for PD at all and never have been. And as someone mentioned above, that's a shame, given the rabid dedication of it's fanbase, and the amount of money available for it. Wait, wait, wait is always the rallying cry for GT. We've been waiting 15 years.
pCARS and iRacing have superior sound
samples. Which is but one element of the total sound, although most people are used to the colour of the accompanying stuff that they don't really notice it. Or their brains filter it out, fill in the gaps etc. It comes back to that moving pictures analogy, and how motion-blurred 24 Hz film doesn't actually look like reality (linear medium, though, so the comparison is superficial, in that interactive stuff is vastly more complex and difficult to make life-like).
And only recently has the creator of the series said they are focusing on sound (I don't ever remember him mentioning sound before), and that they've been working on a totally new way of generating them for a few years now. "All the theory in the world" (at least, the tiny sliver I know of) is what made me suspect this was coming, and I was predicting a "completely new way" two or three years ago.
That doesn't make me Nostradamus (or, rather, his legend), the evidence is there for anyone to make the same inferences, whether they're aware of it or not. A lot changed with GT5
on the sound front (except the samples, which said so much in and of itself, but so much more in context with the changes that were made), and it penned an obvious line from GT2 / GT3 to some future point, which I imagined to lie on the PS4 somewhere. Now Kaz is saying it might be possible on PS3? Great, I say.
It's always budget with you, isn't it?
To be somewhat less than humble, I've made "innovations" (the work has already been done if you know where to look) on practically no budget that most professional teams would never even be allowed to think about. The issue is attitude and approach (from the top), not money. Time could be better spent on a different approach.
It's interesting that the game that showed me where game sounds might be able to go is one that had no money for real engine sounds, so it made its own - they're not hi-fi, but the principles it uses are sound.