Increasing audible range of sound

[GotLag]

I've been rebuilding Honk to use the play_sound function instead of spawning invisible explosions, and I'm not 100% sure but it feels like the volume falloff over distance is more severe than it used to be.

Is there any way to increase the audible range of a sound without simply making it audible everywhere?

Currently if I'm standing next to a station I can barely hear incoming trains' honks when they start braking.

[GotLag]

So far the best I've been able to think up is finding all approximately nearby players, doing a finer distance calculation on them, and then playing the sound for each of those players at a volume proportionate to the distance.

This strikes me as sub-optimal