So I recently watched a game of Asuna playing Reyna on Pearl. He was in a situation where he was holding A site from mid (leading to Art) when the enemy team was in A main.

Someone in his chat asked why he didn't use ult and he said it would give away his position. He shortly explained how the audio cue of someone ulting will sound louder or softer depending on how close he is to you.

I honestly never knew this. Is this an actual thing? If it does work like that, I'm pretty sure it will only be noticed in high elo and most of us don't have to worry about it though.

EDIT: As I see some people misunderstood what I mean: I’m purely talking about the audio cue when you ult, so for example Reyna and Jett. I am well aware that ults like Kayo and KJ give away your position.

EDIT 2: I’ve tested this just now with a friend and it’s pretty weird. I genuinely could not hear a difference whether he ulted right in front of me or from the other site. However, my friend says he does in fact hear a difference. Maybe if I’m hearing the sounds back to back I can tell, but I definitely can’t in the heat of the moment.

I was thinking maybe it has something to do with audio settings. My friend has HRTF turned on while I didn’t, but changing this didn’t make a difference for me. Everything just sounded a bit different, but it wasn’t like the directional audio was better or worse.

The weird thing is that I often hear sounds better than my friend. A lot of the times I’m like “you didn’t hear that?” when I very clearly heard footsteps while my friend didn’t. Also I have a good headset so it’s not that either.

So yeah I honestly don’t know what to make of this. I hear most sounds better than my friend, but somehow can’t notice the difference in the ult audio cues while my friend can. If you have any explanation for this I’d love to hear it.