http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=60417 see post 70 (me) and post 76:
me:
...this map really highlights the shortcomings of the quake3 engine for ambient sound. it doesn't seem to attenuate volume correctly and just cuts sounds off when you get too far.
sock:
The Q3 sound system is broken in many ways, no volume control, cannot turn off ambient sounds, only on! Sounds rarely fade, just get cut off by portals, doors and button cannot have custom sounds and no channel priority for VO etc. I can understand why the sound system was rewritten for D3 because it lacks so many features.
so i guess basic abilities like being able to start and stop a looping sound and play a non-looping sound at regular and non-regular intervals.
i don't know if you can fix the bugged out sound attenuation though, which is a shame because it's the most intrusive of the problems.
about rotaters, since you can't fix the problem itself, maybe give access to a way to show/hide targetted entities.
that way, you could set up triggers to manually hide rotaters when players can't see them anymore.