Reading through this thread makes my mind create annoying low quality artillery shooting/flying/explosion sounds. Help, make it go away!
I agree that sound was often a bit wonky in Spring/ZK. Sometimes many sound playbacks pile up and are played simultaneously, creating a very loud and annoying sound (very common with chat/mapmarker sounds when lagging).
I also remember the occasional louder weapon sound, which I always randomly assumed to be a sound playback not being properly volume-adjusted for distance or something. Super random far fetched idea: Could it be that sound pitches and/or volume are all randomized a tiny little bit for every shot, but every now and then Math.random returns 0 or 1 and that breaks something, which then falls back to a default sound that is not adjusted for distance, etc.? Just a thought.