Are you sure this isn't the result of PD cranking up the placebo effect?
Increased sound saturation/distortion in certain views and cars instead, is quite easily verifiable. For the record, I'm using the external secondary stereo output with the AV cable from the PS3 connected to the inputs of my external PC sound card, in direct monitor mode. From GT5 I'm using the Small Theater setting. I'm using AKG 240s headphones.
This happens also by lowering "race sound effects" to 30% or less. It's clearly a software (GT5) issue.
On some cars it's quite apparent even with internal views when fitting a custom transmission. An example: '54 Chevrolet Corvette C1. With the 'roof' view I've always heard some amount sound saturation/distortion (not hardware caused), but it appears to have worsened with patch 2.08.
I've always noticed a touch of distortion in the tyre sounds in the roof view, but you're right that it's a bit more noticeable now. Using Large Theatre reduces it slightly compared to the other two modes, depending on how many cars are around you making a racket, so it makes me think it's a clipping issue.
With Large Theatre, it's tolerable because the times when it kicks in are only really when you're very close to very loud sounds, so in theory, it should sound distorted. The dynamic range compression obviously means that more sounds are closer to this clipping limit more often, so it's possibly less acceptable.
I was an advocate for a sort of "physically based" distortion, but I hadn't thought about the way that the dynamic range compression would lift everything up into the distortion region. So ideally you'd distort each source according to its "real" volume
before mixing and applying the dynamic range compression. Distortion itself is something that is difficult to do both cheaply and pleasantly in real time, so adding more distortion channels will reduce the chance that the distortion "effect" could be improved. In other words, we'd probably have to live with slightly exaggerated distortion when not using Large Theatre, if they can improve the effect at all.
Saying all that, it probably is just an incorrectly set gain-level causing clipping, and so is technically unintentional. But I think they should attempt to soften it slightly by raising the clipping threshold overall (or rather, reducing gain), and using a separate distortion threshold in conjunction with a limiter (to explicitly prevent clipping) - ideally this second, soft threshold would be higher for the Living Room and Small Theatre settings (and roof view, perhaps) than for Large Theatre. Then any sounds between the distortion threshold and the clipping limit could be subjected to a more pleasing, softer distortion effect, which I think would work well. A user-adjustable limit would be great, too.
I've also noticed that the stock exhaust sound isn't as quiet relative to the full-race any more. So it seems what they've done is just boost the stock, sports and semi-race exhaust volumes to cover a smaller dynamic range, so masking between them is less apparent, which is probably a good thing.
I think the stereo mixing might have been improved slightly, which is why I thought the tyre sounds were better - it feels more spatial again, but without the polarity they introduced a few patches ago. They get there in the end, it seems.
