[rossmum]

Getting onto a tangent here, but having shot a rifle in real life and shot a supposedly similar one in a game, there's a huge difference in the sound. For starters, the real one will make a very felt impact on your eardrums unless you have plugs in... other than that obvious difference, the game sounds are always either much 'cleaner' or have way too much reverb. In the case of (vanilla) Il-2 I was rather disappointed by the gun sounds, and although the SM 9.3 ones are certainly a huge improvement, they're still quite a ways off. Unfortunately recording high-quality samples of actual live fire is very hard to do without either over-cleaning or the excess reverb... so far I've only seen one or two games which got the sounds dead on.