Has anyone else with a retail copy noticed that the menu music sounds like you're listening to a terribly scratched CD? Without saying anything about the track selections themselves, it's fucking unlistenable. Sometimes the song just drops out completely and then stutters back in. Words cannot express how terrible this sounds.

This has to be a special case.... I don't play madden games, but I cannot honestly believe EA would let that happen.

i kept getting static when the pa system tried to play something
 
not a good omen

Did I say "Menu music?" It's throughout the whole game, and spills over into commentary and crowd noise. The crowd cheering sounds like a three second clip of static that is playing on repeat on a CD player with an obvious "seam" or reset. Unbelievable for a AAA title and publisher.

Feel like you must have got a bad disc? Either that or your ears are different to everyone elses. I'm sure this issue would have been spotlighted more if it was on every disc.

Not having this problem at all. I'd take the disc back.

As bad as the commentary in this game is, THAT never happened to me while I was playing it. I think you have a bad disc.

Yeah, sounds like a bad/defective disc. Take it back to the store, they will probably exchange it.
BTW: If you want to find out if your systems disc drive/ laser is bugging out, just play Gears of War 1 or Uncharted 1 (if you´re on PS3) on it. Those have all sorts of weird issues if your drives not working well ;)

The audio mix is also horrendous. There are times when big plays happen and the crowd is silent. 16 fucking years I've been playing this game, and Tiburon can't figure out that NFL games are loud and raucous? It's like playing football in a fish tank.

It's something they can patch no?

@thornie said:

The audio mix is also horrendous. There are times when big plays happen and the crowd is silent. 16 fucking years I've been playing this game, and Tiburon can't figure out that NFL games are loud and raucous? It's like playing football in a fish tank.

You can adjust the audio mix, no?

Okay, brace yourselves, but someone was wrong about something on the internet. Also, said wrong person went off on a tangent making himself look like an idiot.

Couldn't sleep last night so I popped on Deus Ex to see if I'd have the same issues with another game. No go, so I took a soft, dry cloth to Madden, and it sounded like an actual commercial product. Just played one more full game and pent some time menu cruising, and all the sounds was normal. I'm not saying there aren't some technical issues like bad menu response times and some incongruent audio mixing, but it's not the full fledged tech disaster I made it out to be.

With a TON of disc based media, I've never had one perform so badly fresh out of the case. Guess I've been lucky.

@emergency: You can, but then there are no dynamics, everything is just loud. It's more a of a creative/production flaw then a technical one.