How to Hear the Enemy Team's Voice in a CS2 Demo

During a match you cannot hear the enemy. That is not a mute on your end - it is the server declining to send you their voice at all. A demo does not undo that decision, it replays it.

So the question splits in two, and only the second half is about console commands: was the enemy's voice ever written into this file, and if it was, how do you pick them out of the ten?

Just want the number? Upload the demo to the CS2 Voice Comms Calculator , which reads the slot table and labels each player with their team, so "the other five" is something you click rather than something you guess.

The short answer

Set both convars to -1 before playback and you will hear everyone the file contains, enemy included:

tv_listen_voice_indices -1
tv_listen_voice_indices_h -1

If the enemy is still silent after that, you are not missing a command. Their voice is not in the demo, and the rest of this page is about why, and which file to go get instead.

Why the enemy is missing to begin with

Voice in Counter-Strike is routed by team. sv_alltalk is the switch, and what turning it on does is described by the game itself as letting players hear all other players' voice communication with no team restrictions.³ Competitive play runs with it off, which is the point - you should not hear the site call from the people taking the site.

Follow that through to the recording. A POV demo, the kind you make yourself with record, is a recording of the network stream your client received. With alltalk off, the enemy's voice packets were never in that stream. There is nothing to unmute later, because nothing arrived.

SourceTV is a listener too, and that is the whole mechanism

The demos you download are not your client's recording, they are SourceTV's. Which raises the same question one level up: what was SourceTV allowed to hear?

In CS2 the answer is, by default, nothing. SourceTV does not record player voice chat unless the server has sv_alltalk 1, and the community plugin that exists to fix this works by modifying SourceTV's own voice flags so that it hears the voices of all players.² Not by adding a recording feature - by moving SourceTV out of the team-routing rules that were keeping half the match away from it.

That is the entire explanation for why FACEIT demos have both teams in them and your matchmaking demo does not.

Which demos actually contain the enemy

Demo source	Enemy voice in the file?
Your own POV recording (record)	No - your client was never sent it
Valve matchmaking	No - the file carries no voice at all
Valve Premier	No - same
FACEIT	Yes
ESEA and other leagues	Yes, where the league records comms
Community SourceTV server	Only if that server enabled it

The two Valve rows deserve their own note, because they fail for a different reason than the first row does. Matchmaking and Premier demos contain no voice audio data whatsoever - the tool that extracts voice tracks out of Counter-Strike demos carries that warning at the top of its README, because there is nothing in an MM demo to extract.¹ Your own team is missing too. The track is empty, so team routing never enters into it.

So if you want to review what the other side called, the file you need is the FACEIT one for that match, not the Valve one.

Hearing only the enemy

-1 gives you all ten talking over each other, which is fine for catching one moment and useless for studying an opponent's mid-round. To isolate a side, you build the number yourself.

The value is a bitfield: one bit per player slot, low 32 bits in tv_listen_voice_indices and high 32 in tv_listen_voice_indices_h, which is the split the demo tools implement when they generate these commands for you.⁴ A 5v5 only ever touches the low one, so the second command stays at 0 unless you are unmuting everybody.

Five consecutive slots come out to two numbers worth remembering:

Slots	Bits	Value
The first five	1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + 16	31
The second five	32 + 64 + 128 + 256 + 512	992
All ten	both rows	1023

992 is only the enemy if the enemy actually occupies the second five slots, and nothing guarantees that. Slot order comes from the player entity order recorded in the demo, which has no relationship to the scoreboard or to the teams. When a demo does happen to group the sides, 992 works and starts to look like a rule; the demo that puts two of your teammates in the back half is the one where you spend twenty minutes convinced the command is broken.

Check before you trust it. Manually that means stepping through the slots and noting who appears:

spec_player 1
spec_player 2
spec_player 3

The player in spec_player N is bit N-1, so slot 6 contributes 32. Or skip the loop - the calculator reads the slot table straight out of the demo, labels each player with their name and team, and the All T and All CT buttons then build the mask for a whole side in one click.

The team aliases lie after the half

If you use CS Demo Manager, it exposes voice_ct and voice_t aliases, plus voice_STEAMID64 for a single player.⁵ They are convenient and they have one sharp edge: the team aliases follow each player's starting side, not the side they are on now.⁵

For most purposes that is a footnote. For this one it is the whole thing, because "the enemy" is a moving target - after the swap, voice_t selects the five players who started T, who are now the CT side. Half the match, the alias names the opposite of what you meant. A mask built from the actual slots does not have this problem, since slots do not swap at halftime.

Telling "no voice" apart from "one side only"

Worth thirty seconds before you conclude anything, because the two failures have different fixes.

Set both convars to -1, play the demo, and skip to the end of a round - the talkiest moment in any match. Then:

• You hear nobody, ever. The file has no voice track. Check what recorded it; if it was matchmaking or Premier, that is the answer and no command changes it.
• You hear five people and they are all yours. The voice track exists but SourceTV only ever received one side. That is a server-config outcome, not a playback one.
• You hear ten people. Both sides are there. Now go build the mask.

All-chat is the other record

Voice is not the only thing in the file:

tv_relaytextchat 2

2 relays everything including all-chat, 0 hides chat entirely, and FACEIT hands this out alongside the two voice commands when it tells players how to review a demo.⁶ It earns its place here specifically: all-chat text was broadcast to both teams while the match was live, so it survives in demos where enemy voice did not. When the voice track is one-sided, the chat log is often the only thing you have from the other side.

Enter all three before playdemo, not during playback.

They reset every time

Both convars return to 0 when CS2 closes. This is the "it worked last night" trap: nothing broke, the session simply started from silence again. Keep the commands somewhere you can paste from.

The order to do it in

1. Check what recorded the demo. FACEIT or a league, not matchmaking or Premier.
2. Paste tv_listen_voice_indices -1, tv_listen_voice_indices_h -1 and tv_relaytextchat 2 before you play it.
3. Confirm you can hear ten voices, not five.
4. Find which slots the other side occupies, and add up their bit values.
5. Set tv_listen_voice_indices to that number, leave _h at 0, and replay.

Steps 3 and 4 are the ones the CS2 Voice Comms Calculator takes off your hands: upload the demo, read the teams off the slot list, click All T or All CT, copy the two lines.