WARNING: Turning on sound in EVE may make dogs bark, scare your parents, make cats panic, wake you roomate up in the middle of the night shouting at the top of their lungs because they think you are being robbed, or provoke the question ‘EVE has sound?’
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EVE has sound? 
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I feel like this is a meme I’m not getting.
Not sure it actually has any specific meaning, just something players have said over the course of Eve’s history and continue to do so. Folks were saying this all the way back before I started playing around late 2009. Any time I ever asked about it I was given the same answer.
EVE has the sounds of guns, modules, warnings, and some spoken Aura messages during the tutorial, but unlike other games doesn’t have “flavor” sound, like the Fallout radio stations, or spoken announcements on those big screens, or spoken agent mission text, or verbal interactions like in Mass Effect. So, as a result, you can play the game just fine if you turn the sound off, and often it’s required, so you can hear voice-comms better and/or increase your frames-per-second during large fleet battles.
The meme indicates that people play this game better with its sound off.
As I understand it, sound used to cause significant problems to the point that some years back it was preferabe to play without sound enabled.
EVE without sound became a meme.
In todays EVE, World Sound is 0 by default (a legacy of the aformentioned problems) and every other day in Rookie Help someone asks why they can’t hear guns, warp sounds etc, and usually several people answer with ‘EVE has sound?’
… and so the meme continues. 
Definitely EVE plays better without sound interrupting your favorite moans. Em, I mean music.
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First fleet I was ever in I turned off my sound, 2008ish. Whenever it occurs to me to turn it on to see what the soundscape is like, I get annoyed within 15 minutes and turn it back off. “EVE has sound?” is because only rookies who haven’t found the controls yet have it turned on at all. The efforts to improve the sound are usually trying to bribe the players to deal with how terrible it’s always been by adding pieces of intel you can only get through sound. And then once enough people get hooked to those 1 or 2 sounds, making the whole sound system even worse than ever. It almost looks like it’s deliberately bad.
So this tells me that EVE needs more flavor sounds, as put by one Memphis Baas:
CONCORD vessels making more coherent messages to themselves when in proximity to us would be a start. Also, in the story, most of the sounds we hear are based on the computer analyzing the data and input of the environment and making sounds based on that.
NASA does much the same thing, by taking their satellite data and converting it into audio. Our problem in EVE is we have music based on similar concepts, and it’s good, but it is a little too structured in terms of ambience. Stars make random audio bursts, radio, infrared, the works. Each type of star should have its own unique sound pattern, and a randomly generated specific pattern for itself.
Say Jita and Amarr have similar suns (not that they do, last I checked) but while they have similar audio patterns, they should be distinct enough to differentiate.
You should be able to navigate EVE playing blind by moving the cursor around, and when it lands on something, it makes a sound or stream of sounds that allow it to be identified. Combat sites and signatures make these sounds already, so why not add it to all other objects?
Heck, add it to ships as well, give them an extra layer of flavor, give it attitude, emotion.
One day EVE will be filled with the sounds of colors, and the color of sounds for the blind, and they will be able to navigate it without a care. Like being a bat with echolocation. But for EVE. Just think about it.
Bottom line?
We need more sounds mixed in that can benefit the player, or be enticing enough to leave alone.
You hear this, CCP? Take notes.
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People would turn it off even faster.
With CCP executing it, of course. If done right, it might actually have promise. What would be an acceptable soundscape for EVE?
Back when EVE had a guy who worked on sound (instead of the current guys who are mostly concerned with trying to NOT work on the sound) I had suggested a soundscape where all sounds were prioritized by urgency, and adjusted for it. Like, a sound that is ambient should be white noise, like a sound version of a fleece blanket. A sound that is urgent, for example when your guns have emptied and are done reloading, the sound to tell you to turn your guns back on would have a louder snappy sound. Shoot, even better if the whole urgency evaluation was dynamic (don’t give me a shield alarm if I am in an active armor tank, but make the armor alarm even more urgent if I am in a shield tank, and don’t make me mess with the settings to get it to behave in an intuitive way.)
imo, that’s one of the biggest failures of EVE’s sound. Most of the sounds I don’t care about even a little, yet they are loud and obnoxious. If a sort of echolocation/sonar was built into EVE’s soundscape, it would all have to be subtle to the point of being just different textures of white noise.
In the very early days of Eve turning the sound on produced a noticeable performance hit. Therefore most people turned it off, to the point where saying you had the sound on got the reply of “Eve has sound”.
The birth of a meme.
I feel like I just explained a bad joke.
There is also EVE Voice that was causing low performance one time. Then CCP told us to turn it off.
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