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What's Up With Computer Audio?
Mr.Tweak writes "Last month during QuakeCon it became clearly apparent that computer audio has become somewhat of a forgotten component in the computer industry when talking to gamers and listening to companies at the gaming event. We'll present some benchmark numbers of five different sound solutions as well as provide commentary along the way on our thoughts of computer audio solutions and what should be done to improve things using nVidia's SoundStorm APU as an example."
It's a little hollow sometimes, but it's cheap and effective! You have to crank it though:
sweet
Never argue with an idiot, he'll just lower you to his level and beat you with experience.
All you need is an FM-synth card and the midi that was used in the original DOOM to get your adrenaline going while gaming!
No game since has ever matched DOOM/DOOM2's music effect upon the player, in my opinion.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The forgotten component - What's up with computer audio?
Author: Cameron Wilmot
Editor: Steve Dougherty
Category: Audio
Created: 06/09/2004
What's up with computer audio? - Page 1 [Introduction]
Introduction
Last month during QuakeCon near Dallas, Texas in the United States it became clearly apparent to me that computer audio has become somewhat of a forgotten component in the computer industry when talking to gamers and listening to companies at the gaming event.
When nVidia released the mighty onboard SoundStorm APU (Audio Processing Unit) back with their nForce chipset for the Athlon XP platform, gamers and general PC enthusiasts around the world were thrilled and thought they were in for a change for the years ahead as far as cinematic quality computer audio goes. It seems like they were wrong though as nVidia basically confirmed at QuakeCon that the hardware powered SoundStorm APU which is the only sound solution capable of encoding Dolby Digital (or AC-3) on the fly would not be part of the upcoming nForce4 chipset. When nVidia let this news out to gamers in the crowd, it was clear that the group was thoroughly disappointed.
Not only was the nVidia SoundStorm APU the only sound solution capable of encoding Dolby Digital on the fly (which produces true and accurate 5.1 surround sound via either optical or digital coaxial cable to a set of computer speakers supporting these connections or to an external amplifier), it was also hardware accelerated meaning it does not chew up precise CPU cycles like other inferior onboard solutions which in turn reduces frames per second and do not have the ability to send separate digital signals to anymore than two channels. You'll get 5.1 sound using three analog cables but this type of setup is nowhere near as impressive or realistic as what the SoundStorm produces.
But you might as well forget about high quality and impressive sound solutions such as the SoundStorm as nVidia and their motherboard partners in Taiwan don't seem to think this type of quality sound solution is important to consumers. If you can't justify spending hundreds of dollars on an external PCI sound card from companies like Creative, Phillips or Terratec (which is very understandable), also taking into account that all these sound solutions don't offer on the fly hardware encoding of Dolby Digital, you'll need to stick with the cheap and nasty onboard solutions from companies such as Cmedia and Realtek. While these onboard solutions have improved a little over the past few years as far as CPU utilization and general sound quality production goes, computer users deserve much better.
Steve (our news poster and resident SoundStorm expert) and I collected a total of five different sound solutions including onboard SoundStorm via the ABIT NF7-S motherboard, Terratec Sixpack 5.1+, Sound Blaster Live! Value, Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS Platinum Pro and a cheap Cmedia 8738 PCI sound card. We have then compared the true real-world performance (as hard as it was) of all five sound cards in a bunch of today's most popular games over an entire weekend via an expensive high-end Onkyo digital receiver and 5.1 Jamo speaker system . We'll present the benchmark numbers to you and the struggles involved in doing so as well as provide commentary along the way on our thoughts of computer audio solutions and what should be done.
It's the forgotten computer component but we are hoping today we can help kick start the revival of computer audio for the better, highlighting a few key points which seem not important to most of the design and manufacturing leaders in the industry.
/. were doing the review :P
I personally got the cheap Chaintech card based on the VIA ENVY24 chip. It panoolies Creative's lineup for overall sound quality any day of the week, though if you REALLY want EAX you have to get one of their cards. But I'd say it's not worth it - with this one I'm able to discern lyrics and finer details of music that never came out on an SB Live.
Maybe for most people it's nice to have one component that just works as advertised, and doesn't necessarily need to be replaced with an expensive upgrade every 2 years. Not to cast aspersions on the geek's need to endlessly tinker, but don't we have our hands full already with graphic cards, processors, memory, etc.?
If you think about it what has Creative done to anyone who has made a decent card in the past few years? they either sued them to the brink of death (Aureal), or acquired all the technologies that other developers used (sensaura) (sp?)
the only other real alternative was Nvidia which basically is suffering from cheap mainboard manufactures who wont spend the extra 50 cents on a decent DAC. the vast majority of boards with it are nowhere near soundstorm certified, thus its removal from A64 boards. I expect Intel to go the same way with their new chipset coming out too.
While I was at Quakecon (with it's roughly 10 vendors) I saw new games with amazing sounds and at least two vendors who were hyping their audio technology. They had 5.1 headphones and some incredible THX speakers from Creative. When playing Doom3 with a good audio system, I had an audio experience unlike that of any other game i've ever played.
Admittedly, there were not many vendors, but saying that audio is a forgotten component just doesn't reflect the reality of Quakecon. Or are you just trying to get readers?
Perhaps you've just noticed that reflex and knowing the maps better than your opponent are more important that hearing your bullets hit him?
You can get audio on you computer just as good as anything else. There are only so many standarts. 5.1 6.0, both have cards, "SB live 5.1 FOREVER". The speaker systems, are very good. I myself have the Logiteck THX system. very nice. Loader them most home systems, and great sound quality. There really isn't much to change untill they come out with a new standart....
I must have missed this feature, all my porn watching is in the middle of the night so I do not disturb my wife with my wanking. SHE must have disabled the sound!!!
What's up with computer audio? - Page 2 [What is so good about SoundStorm?]
What is so good about SoundStorm?
The best place to start is discussing exactly what is so good about SoundStorm and why it should be considered the benchmark for computer audio. In an ideal world, the standards the SoundStorm produce should be just that, the standard - and then we should be seeing improvements over those base standards much more often than we do at the moment.
First and foremost, the beauty of the nVidia SoundStorm APU is that it is capable of encoding Dolby Digital 5.1 on the fly via hardware acceleration and not software (CPU). This means that in any games you play and as long as you are using optical or digital coaxial cable with your surround sound speakers (anything above 2.1 channels), the hardware APU will do the intensive job of reproducing the sound from the game to Dolby Digital 5.1 or AC-3 so you get proper positional surround sound.
No other computer sound solution on the market is capable of doing this - Creative can do this with their EAX positional surround sound via enhancing the signal along analog cables (and others can do the same type of thing with Microsoft DirectSound 3D and less so A3D these days) but it will only work in games which support EAX (and DirectSound 3D via DirectX and A3D) and it's not as good as Dolby Digital in terms of true cinematic realistic positional sound. Onboard sound solutions utilizing their digital SPDIF output (whether it be optical or coaxial, depending on what the manufacturer chooses to go for) can only output to the front two speakers as without an encoded 5.1 signal from the computer end beforehand, what is being sent through your digital optical/coax cable is limited to stereo (two channels) of sound... so you can kiss your surround sound in games goodbye. The only way you can achieve proper positional surround sound in gaming with all other sound solutions on the market apart from the mighty SoundStorm is to utilize their analogue outputs (centre/sub, front, & rear jacks) but then it is not digital so you don't get the true to life effects of proper digital.
Gaming companies could (in theory) implement a feature within their titles for RAW Dolby Digital 5.1 to be outputted as you play but for all sound solutions that don't have real-time hardware Dolby Digital encoding capabilities, it means your CPU would be taking a massive hit, making the game run like a dog. The beauty of SoundStorm is that it takes the hit off your CPU with the encoding on the fly and does it with its own APU in isolated hardware. Some brand new AC'97 2.3 audio codec's are said to be able to provide Dolby Digital encoding capabilities but it is done via software which means your CPU does all the work and the performance hit of performing such an intensive task would be bad and we aren't even sure if it will be on the fly like SoundStorm.
The only time other sound solutions that are able to play back a pure DTS or Dolby Digital 5.1 signal is when it is already in RAW format at the computer end - like when you play a DVD with PowerDVD. This software has an option in the settings to allow your audio to be outputted in a RAW untouched format called "SPDIF". It's merely a pass-through of untouched audio content on the DVD. The amplifier gets the signal that way, and decodes it by itself, which is exactly the same principle as that of a standalone DVD player connected to your amplifier in a home entertainment setup.
The final point about why the SoundStorm is so good is the fact that it does all its audio processing via its own hardware controller which is a more expensive design. Cheap onboard solutions from companies such as Cmedia and Realtek rely on the CPU to take care of all the audio processing tasks. Since valuable CPU cycles are being used up, your overall frames per second will be reduced. When you play games such as Battlefield Vietnam (which is one of the most impressive games I have played as far as sound goes) you really notice the d
Right now I currently work as a sound tech in college, and I can attest that the "problem" is not just in the computer realm. Very rarely do people care about excellent sound quality, though video quality is almost always something people are picky about. There's probably several reasons for this, but I think a lot of it has to do with people being tone deaf and putting their sight above their hearing in importance.
Audio has a far lower point of diminishing returns than does, say, graphics.
There's only so much fidelity you need for "Argghhhh" and "Kaboom" and "Zap."
Let's take Doom3 as an example.
Which would you rather have-- Doom3 on a Hammerfall pro audio card with a Voodoo2 or Doom3 on an Nvidia 6800 with a $20 Soundblaster Live?
For me, there's no contest. I do happen to have an Audiophile pro card, but it's because I make music, not because of gaming. For music applications there are SCADS of high-end cards. I just don't think the typical user needs them, unless he's some bling-fanatic who defines himself by how many of the latest, blue-LEDest IPOD-things he has.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
I love my soundstorm setup, just get the latest drivers and $100 speakers :D.
I love my Audigy 2 Plat with my Logitecth 5.1 (really high quality) speakers. I don't really use speakers much for gaming, but music sounds excellent. The audigy 2 has been basically at the top for what, two years now? Maybe it's not the hardware as much as it is the software. When I play a new game, I have yet to go, "wow, this sounds amazing." New games simply won't utilize a new tecnnology in sound hardware.
It works pretty well. We use Adobe audition for the audio editing, and we have a near-pro setup for well under 6K total. Quite a bit cheaper than the old days!
Best Buy can have you arrested
Isn't that supposed to eliminate (or at least minimize) all this contentious peripheral/bus hoo-hah?
http://www.tweaktown.com.nyud.net:8090/document.ph p?dType=article&dId=695
wait a little, eventually it should load.
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
Well, TweakTown was promptly slashdotted, so here's the full text: What's up with computer audio? - Page 1 [Introduction] Introduction Last month during QuakeCon near Dallas, Texas in the United States it became clearly apparent to me that computer audio has become somewhat of a forgotten component in the computer industry when talking to gamers and listening to companies at the gaming event. When nVidia released the mighty onboard SoundStorm APU (Audio Processing Unit) back with their nForce chipset for the Athlon XP platform, gamers and general PC enthusiasts around the world were thrilled and thought they were in for a change for the years ahead as far as cinematic quality computer audio goes. It seems like they were wrong though as nVidia basically confirmed at QuakeCon that the hardware powered SoundStorm APU which is the only sound solution capable of encoding Dolby Digital (or AC-3) on the fly would not be part of the upcoming nForce4 chipset. When nVidia let this news out to gamers in the crowd, it was clear that the group was thoroughly disappointed. Not only was the nVidia SoundStorm APU the only sound solution capable of encoding Dolby Digital on the fly (which produces true and accurate 5.1 surround sound via either optical or digital coaxial cable to a set of computer speakers supporting these connections or to an external amplifier), it was also hardware accelerated meaning it does not chew up precise CPU cycles like other inferior onboard solutions which in turn reduces frames per second and do not have the ability to send separate digital signals to anymore than two channels. You'll get 5.1 sound using three analog cables but this type of setup is nowhere near as impressive or realistic as what the SoundStorm produces. But you might as well forget about high quality and impressive sound solutions such as the SoundStorm as nVidia and their motherboard partners in Taiwan don't seem to think this type of quality sound solution is important to consumers. If you can't justify spending hundreds of dollars on an external PCI sound card from companies like Creative, Phillips or Terratec (which is very understandable), also taking into account that all these sound solutions don't offer on the fly hardware encoding of Dolby Digital, you'll need to stick with the cheap and nasty onboard solutions from companies such as Cmedia and Realtek. While these onboard solutions have improved a little over the past few years as far as CPU utilization and general sound quality production goes, computer users deserve much better. Steve (our news poster and resident SoundStorm expert) and I collected a total of five different sound solutions including onboard SoundStorm via the ABIT NF7-S motherboard, Terratec Sixpack 5.1+, Sound Blaster Live! Value, Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS Platinum Pro and a cheap Cmedia 8738 PCI sound card. We have then compared the true real-world performance (as hard as it was) of all five sound cards in a bunch of today's most popular games over an entire weekend via an expensive high-end Onkyo digital receiver and 5.1 Jamo speaker system . We'll present the benchmark numbers to you and the struggles involved in doing so as well as provide commentary along the way on our thoughts of computer audio solutions and what should be done. It's the forgotten computer component but we are hoping today we can help kick start the revival of computer audio for the better, highlighting a few key points which seem not important to most of the design and manufacturing leaders in the industry. What's up with computer audio? - Page 2 [What is so good about SoundStorm?] What is so good about SoundStorm? The best place to start is discussing exactly what is so good about SoundStorm and why it should be considered the benchmark for computer audio. In an ideal world, the standards the SoundStorm produce should be just that, the standard - and then we should be seeing improvements over those base standards much more often than we do at the moment. First and foremost, the beauty of the nVidia SoundStorm APU is th
I don't know what a soundstorm audiosystem is...
But I have one question for Slashdot....
Is there an affordable sound card with OPTICAL or Coaxial DIGITAL (coax preferable) out that works well with Linux? I've been looking for one for ages, and there are some that exist, but I haven't heard any anecdotal evidence as to their working with Linux.
The basic idea is to hook it to a surround receiver, and if a DD sound bitstream is being sent out (like from a game), it aught to be decoded in the receiver... Right?
Is there any such thing that exists?
Somebody should review cards with different headphones- cause everyone's mom yells at them to turn the volume down ;)
We've had 3-positioning of sound on as many output channels as most people can handle, since the days of the SBLive! Maybe sound is forgotten because it's been delivering all we need and more in stock packages forever. I wish the same could be said for graphics.
For many years there were advancements in sound back in the DOS days. You could make audio sound better with 16 bits, or 44.1khz. You could do wavetable systhesis so MIDI sounded realistic (at least compared to the beeps and boops of FM systhesis). There was advancement.
Then CDs came. As games moved to CDs and hard drives got bigger, suddenly it was possible to play real music, and it didn't matter how good your MIDI was because the game producers could use real music. Now we see it in MP3s and Ogg files used to store the music.
So for a long time, the sound world has been stagnate. Years ago we saw "3D" sound, but it never took off. Creative had EAX, which simulated it somehow, and Aureal had A3D which did wave-tracing or something like that. What I can tell you was that A3D was QUITE superior. But many games didn't use it, and it did have a CPU impact. People were more interested in better 3D graphics, sound didn't seem that important. Aureal eventually died and was bought by Creative Labs. As far as I know they haven't used any of the technology that they aquired.
So without competition things stagnated. With Aureal dead, no one really cared about 3D sound. So all we've gotten is "standard" sound cards that do 2D. Sure you can get 5.1 and 7.1 and stuff, but nothing amazing. And worst of all, there are no drivers for my favorite soundcard for newer versions of Windows or for Linux (at least not without paying).
So here we are. Aureal is dead, and people are starting to care again. Now all we have is Creative. There is no real competition. But now that Doom 3 supports it (HL2 probably will too) and it's claimed that you really need it for the best expiriance you can get, things will hopefully advance again. Now that graphics are very near "good enough", perhaps sound (which in many ways hasn't changed since the SB16 as far as today's games are concerned) will catch up.
So long... Aureal.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
What's up with computer audio? - Page 3 [Benchmarks - Test System Setup and Comments]
Test System System
Processor(s): AMD Athlon XP-M 2600+ @ 3900+ (2.6GHz)
Motherboard(s): ABIT NF7-S
Memory(s): 2x 512MB Buffalo 2-2-2-5 BH-5 @ 221MHz
Video Card(s): Gigabyte Radeon X800 XT PE 256MB (Supplied by Gigabyte)
Hard Disk(s): 2 x 200GB Western Digital "JB" in RAID 0
Sound Card(s): nVidia SoundStorm via ABIT NF7-S (hardware accelerated), Terratec Sixpack 5.1+ (hardware accelerated), Sound Blaster Live! Value (hardware accelerated), Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS Platinum Pro (hardware accelerated) and Cmedia 8738 PCI (software)
Operating System Used: Microsoft Windows 2000 SP4
Drivers Used: nVidia nForce 4.27, ATI Catalyst 4.8, Cmedia v0644, nVidia Audio driver 4.42, Terratec 5.12.01.3057, AUDIGY2_1_84_50 and SBLive! 1.03.001
We tested every game with a resolution of 1280 x 1024 with AA 4x / AF 8x forced on in the Windows control panel. Vertical Sync was disabled for all testing. Maximum sound detail was enabled where possible to make sure the SoundStorm was working the hardest - encoding Dolby Digital on the fly for true positional surround sound in all games. We also provided results with sound disabled to give you an idea of the overall impact of sound in games on frame rate.
We quickly discovered that providing you guys with a 100% true and accurate measurement of sound card frames per second performance would be a tough job. While we cannot be 100% accurate, we opted for a pure real-world testing environment instead. Except for UT2004 and Q3A (our testing showed a good and consistent difference in results) we did not use any pre-recorded timedemos as we want to provide a true indication of performance - as tedious as it was. Instead for the rest of the games we fired up FRAPS and measured the average frames per second while we actually played the game each time.
This is the part where we cannot be 100% accurate - we played the same stage in each game, shot the same amount of rockets, jumped the same amount of times and took the same line in the drag race but each time there were small inconsistencies which cannot be helped. This method of testing took us much longer (an entire weekend in total) than it would have if we used timedemos but the results are certainly truer than they would have been if we just timedemos.
The fact that it was such a time consuming and tough job for us is another testament to the fact that computer audio is a forgotten component because there is hardly a fraction of the audio benchmarks available on the web as there are graphics benchmark software. Everyone makes a big deal out of a few frames per second difference between graphics cards, but why is there never any mention of the differences that can be achieved in that same few fps between various sound card solutions? Some new audio benchmark software would go along way to helping this situation! Any developers out there listening?
Let's get started and see how the mighty SoundStorm shapes up against the competition. It is VERY IMPORTANT to remember although the SoundStorm is hardware optimized, it is working in several cases at least twice as hard as the other sound solutions due to the on the fly encoding of Dolby Digital from an original stereo format in all of the games. Plus the SoundStorm also supports a full 64 path sound environment meaning more sound effects were processed at the same time over other unsupported cards (Cmedia and Sound Blaster Live! Value).
- x-empt
Disclaimer: I never played Doom1, or Doom2 & I've not played Doom3.
So, I don't know how it compares, but the music on Diablo added an awful lot to the atmosphere. It's reasonably scary, and when it gets the sound of an angry charger put over it you end up almost jumping out of your seat.
Oh, Total Annihilation had a great score, but it didn't actually do much for the game, it just sounded great.
FGD 135
I think the problem is that human sight is very analytical and so it notices right away defects and "artifacts". When we listen to game audio, we are rarely as attuned to it as we are the graphics. As long as the sound is more or less accurate, we just sit there and take it for granted. Have you noticed how people are just fine listening to crappy radios or 64 kb/s encoded MP3's, yet they hate streaming video?
...Presented in Crystal Clear(tm) DIGITAL sound!
(Have to say 'DIGITAL' in all caps so it sounds more impressive)
People are far more forgiving of bad bit quality than skips or pops. But no one should be surprised. After all, FM radio's quality ain't all that and TONS of people still listen to it everyday.
I guess for most people 'Business Audio' will do.
P.S. Business Audio is real. Compaq used to use this phrase on some of their desktops. They had the sound card AND speaker inside the case. No lie.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Uhm, I don't know about your reciever, but as for coax --well, you can run coax off of any sound card line out. Go to your local Radio Whatever and explain that you want to go from your 1.5mm to coax. All you need is some adapters and then you can run that coax for a hell of a long way and still get a nice clean 900mhz line-out signal. I have some extra adapters sitting upstairs, but I'm not going to give them to you.
I use a lot of these around the house. I use coax 8-way splitters to take the signal around the room and into a few different rooms so I can use small amps. Sounds so damn good. It all comes from a sound card or a little teenie MP3 player if the PC is down and goes into a plain old coax splitter like you use for cable TV. Then at the ends it gets more adapters and turns back into 1.5. to plug into the amps.
The hardest part actually seems to be finding a place that actually has them. It's easy to find morons who say there's no such thing. But they're out there. Just insist that you've bought them before. They're real.
Sound is generally included with the motherboard now. Which means you have to choose based on all of the features of the motherboard (processor support, memory support, SATA etc.), and sound then becomes "part of the equation" instead of its own calculation.
Pretty much musicians and audiophiles choose their sound chipsets (or cards) carefully, most people buy the Fry's special or just make sure it says "sound included" on the motherboard box.
Not to mention people who buy prebuilt PCs, in which case the manufacturer chooses the cheapest (integrated) chipset.
Since relatively few people pick sound chipsets carefully, the "demand" is effectively "low," and that drives the supply down (and into specialization).
It's all onboard these days. There's absolutely no motivation for a regular user, hell even a power user, to run out and drop another 20-500 dollars on another sound card.
Audiophiles can go on and on about blah blah and sound floors and this and that. So long as the sound is coming from the little multimedia speakers on my desktop, spending more on the source is a waste of cash, IMO.
You don't hear a lot about PC sound, because there's not a lot to say. If you're an audiophile with expensive speakers and all kinds of funky I/O demands, that's one thing. But that's a niche market.
Creative is going to be feeling the hurt. There's a very small market for their stuff.. Audiophiles, and audiophiles don't seem to be impressed with Audigy.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Castle Wolfenstein, first version, 2D ascii, on a Commodore 64...
They had a neat trick. To unlock safes, you had to push the volume up of your monitor to the max to hear the "click". But when an SS entered the room and screamed "Achtung" at the max volume the C64 could produce, you would jump 3 feet behind and rush to take back control of your keyboard to take whatever action necessary to get out of this mess.
The C64... ahhhhh... the good old days.
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
XBox & PS2 games have been doing 5.1 and using sound creatively for a while now. This is yet another example of slashdot reporting old news. The only reason you didn't see it as much on PC is because there were too many different API's and cards to cater to. So using "2D" sound meant everyone had an experience that was similar. Nowadays you see Dolby Digital and sometimes THX on games.
-]Phreak Out[-
In my opinion, audio has almost always taken a back seat in the development of computers, operating systems and programs. It's always an afterthought or the last thing that is added to the design.
Last night I was looking at Croquet, that new Net based 3d graphical environment and I saw no mention of how to deal with sound in this new environment. Sound is a very important part of our lives, I fail to see why it is always has such low priority with the computer industry.
Maybe a little OT, but my first real excitement of computer sound was a proper (err sound blaster 16) sound card with Escape from Castle Wolfenstein running through the hifi. The "big" sound of the machine gun was something pretty exciting back then.
/.'s from a PC sound experience.
Wondering what first popped the clogs of other
Um I'm sorry to have to totally disagree, but the very next iD game - Quake did something kind of evolutionary and paid a big name artist (Nine Inch Nails) to produce their music. It moved the bar far beyond anything MIDI.
:| ;)
Reading back perhaps you're being sarcastic
*DrugCheese rants*
It is quite ironic (yes, this is irony, not coincidence) that an article that purports to bemoan the neglect of sound in favor of picture proceeds to rate the audio gear based on how it impacts graphics performance.
I think the more interesting question to examine is the video card side of this. At what point will video cards exceed the specifications required to make grahpics truely look like real life?
For example, people can actually pick out about 1,000,000 colors or so (IIRC). We got 24/32 bit color and that was the end of innovation in the length of color codes.
What is the resolution of standard human vision? Some quick researching brings us this information: Will we see the same languishing of the video card industry when the new offering can crank out 100fps at 10,600 x 7,000? We've already got the colors part down, resolution and poly counts will come soon enough. The monitors will have to follow suit of course but even current technology is giving some people a hard time: This stuff is so exciting! If I didn't spend all my time focusing on my escort service business, I'd have to becoming a video-card-engineer-person-of-interest.
The sad part is that most people just aren't as sensitive to sound quality. Witness the enormous numbers of people who honestly believe that MP3 (and Ogg, for that matter) sound as good as CD (and 16-bit 44.1 kHz still isn't great IMHO.) I'm a music teacher and audio engineer by profession. The other day, a student of mine was trying to convince me that his SB Audigy was a "pro" card. Seriously... Granted, my M-Audio (for the Linux box) and Digidesign (for the Mac) converters would be inappropriate for gaming, but you know audio is not a high priority for the average geek when they try to tell you that Creative makes professional-grade gear. (Disclaimer: I am an admitted audio snob, and I don't particularly care that much about graphics. My gaming takes place on an Athlon with an old S3 card [I removed the GeForce2 that was in it because it was introducing latency on the sound card], a Powerbook [yep] and a PS1).
Bah,
Not even close to the days before they even invented sound. Walking uphill barefoot in 4 feet of snow and you needed nothing to get your adrenaline going.
Damn lazy kids these days.
Tube Amp
On board tube amps. I've seen it. It's real. This is the shit man.
I would like to see more focus on delivering a higher-quality audio path from game developer to consumer, as opposed to gimmicky post-processing to make things sound "better". (e.g. we want to deliver N channels of 24-bit/96KHz audio with low CPU overhead, rather than a DSP that tries to "enhance" existing audio). Real-time Dolby Digital encoding is great, funky "spatialization" of 2-channel audio is not.
Not to name names, but I have switched away from a formerly reliable company's sound hardware because they got too "creative" (ahem) with their gimmicks and forgot about the basics.
Humans have focused on pretty much just two senses; sight and touch, especially with respect to our hands. If we want to identify something we almost always look at it or pick it up and feel it.
Our sense of smell/taste is notoriously crappy compared to many other animals and unless something is particularly smelly we usually don't pay much attention to that aspect. Our hearing is adequate and is very usefull for communicating language and for tertiary analysis but it isn't usually what we focus on.
We have very exact words for defining shape and size and color. We can say a secreen is X by Y pixels and if we have a general idea of the pixel size that gives many people a pretty good sense of the size and quality of the image. We can say it can display Z colors and although that's a little more inexact it still gives us a reasonably good idea.
On the other hand our words for describing audio in common usage are generally less specific and hace less conotation. If you say that a sound system has seven channels then i and a lot of other non-audiophiles will have very little idea what exactly that means or how it differes from more or less channels. I expect two monitors with the same stats to look pretty similar, but for audio equipment you need to go listen to it to find out which is good and which is bad.
All of which means that when making games or any other mixed media product you will get more bang for your buck if you invest more in video over sound. People will notice it more and be able to describe it better when talking to their friends or writing reviews. Good audio can certainly make a game a lot better, but how many people buy a game just because it has good audio vs. just because it has good graphics? There are certainly a few, i myself happen to know a single hardcore audiophile who builds his own speakers and such, but they're not that common.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
3d positional audio with a 5.1 dolby THC certified system can really kick ass!
Not just by scaring the daylights out of you but in Doom3 and half-life its nice to hear things behind you as well as in front.
With advanced sound algorithms you can hear how far a battle is in Unreal tournament and how fast the rocket is heading to you.
A split second by your reaction time is all it takes for you to get fragged and your opponent to claim another frag.
I dont game as much but sound is essential as well as high frame rates.
http://saveie6.com/
Final Fantasy series, Chrono Series, etc. They all have suspense and battle themes that rival Doom's. Not to mention games from other console genres, like Metal Gear Solid.
Who needs to pay attention to audio with graphics like these? This Quake 3: New Edition sure looks to be excellent. Drool.
It doesn't matter how good your sound card is if the game is outputting a simple stereo single with a music loop and some canned effects. If the developer doesn't go the extra mile to create decent sound content and a good audio playback engine in the game, then it will never sound as good as it looks- but it is possible to do both at once with the right approach.
There's an interesting rant from one of Halo's programmers here about the state and future directions of game audio.
Gimme those tube amps. I really can't get excited over cold digital, give the warm glow of a tube and I'm happy.
Now how do I mount valve in the PCI form factor?
Dude, I'm talking about a soundcard that supplies digital data to a receiver.
If you're taking an analog signal from your computer's soundcard (the 1.5mm output jack is not for digital), and trying to hook it up to the digital coax input on your receiver, squat ain't gonna happen.
Sure, you could use coax, and an F->RCA connector to send stereo audio (over a pair of coax's), but it dosen't make much sense except for the fact that you might be able to do long runs without using a repeater or amp, and that coax is kosher with building codes.
And if you think that the 1.5mm jack on your computer has resolution over 22khz, you're plain nuts. 900MHz my butt.
Who the heck modded this informative? It's got nothing to do with anything.
well, considering that no game save vice city has collected songs from such popular bands before onto a game soundtrack, I can see why you like it.
Of course Bobby Prince didn't realize he was doing MIDI covers of metal bands for Doom, but if you've heard much Alice in Chains, Pantera, Slayer, etc. it's pretty damn obvious. To try to pass that stuff off as his own work was just shameless.
Of course, it's hilariously appropriate that the Doom3 title track is a ripoff of a Tool song.
Whould you rather be blind or deaf?
No game since has ever matched DOOM/DOOM2's music effect upon the player, in my opinion.
You've obviously never played quake 1. IMO quake 1 had the best music soundtrack (thanks to Trent Reznor)
If you need slightly better performance and advanced feature support like EAX then the creative cards are the way to go, but if musical fidelity is your priority there are far better options. The Chaintech AV710 is 25$ retail and outperforms the audigy 2 zs with its superior Wolfson DAC. If two channel gaming is fine for you (headphones give great spacial relation anyway) then you will love this card. The next step (quality and feature wise) are the E-MU line. This Creative owned company produces the 0404, a $100 card that most audiophiles agree will output sound like a 500$+ cd player. The $200 1212 option is said to perform as well as any sub $1000 cd player/DAC.
Quake did something kind of evolutionary and paid a big name artist (Nine Inch Nails) to produce their music. It moved the bar far beyond anything MIDI.
:)
In my opinion ANYTHING goes beyond MIDI, I have always felt those "general" instruments very embarrassing way to replicate the sounds of any band or orchestra. Now, if we think back those days when the best game musics were made in Amiga 500....
love slashdot. populate it. use it. abuse it. hate it. kill it. miss it. stop following links, they only kill servers.
not sure about it, but recent alsa versions should work with some old aureal card.
SGI had it right in 1993/1994....
A good quality DAC/ADC setup capable of 48khz audio. The Indy/Indigo^2 could change the electrical characteristics and turn the headphone port into line out 3+4 and mic port into line in 3+4 for 4 track recording, this was a nice perk.
It featured SPDIF in and out as far back as 1992?. Newer systems had AES/BEU ports that could do several protocols for 8 track communications to ADAT and similiar systems.
Simple and effective. A DAC/ADC setup with low noise floor, high quality. That is all that is required.
Everyone goes for stupid 5.1 channel crap. Blaaa. How about something that is stable, basic, and works well.
The on board audio on my Via? Sucked. On board audio on the Soyo board I use now is _HORRIBLE_. I'm using a SB Live in the PC, and it is fine -- I hacked the Soyo riser card that has the TOSLink in and out to the SBLive expansion connector (details on my webpage) and that allows use of an external DAC and what not.
I owned a turtle beach montego II, but Crative bought and terminated ?Aureal? so drivers went MIA. I was pissed, and that turned me against most PC sound card vendors.
But yea, overall PC sound cards are nutty, wishing to push goofy "features" and destroyed brand names (THX) on the sheeple. Does anyone actually think they have a THX setup around their computer? I mean, come on. I'm not an audio snob by any means but much of it is plain rediculous
I recently got a Macintosh G4 to add to the PC and SGI. It will be nice to explore the audio applications that are availible under OS X.
Oh and my vote for my greatest moment in PC sound? Maybe hearing Space Quest III on the Adlib... or The Sound Blaster 1.0 when ?Roger Wilco? says WHERE AM I!?. Oh yea, and Ghostbusters II by activision talked out of the Sound Blaster 1.0.
Never owned a MT-32, but had my share of GRAVIS ULTRASOUNDS! Red card of love, rocking the Renaissance Composer 669 and Future Crew demos. Ahhh the good ol days.
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
Or did we all stop using P4's when I wasnt looking? Intel High definition Audio: http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/hdaudio.htm?i id=ipp_desk+highdef&
Final Thoughts
From our results we can see that there is a good difference in frame rates between the best and worst sound solutions, especially in games such as Battlefield Vietnam which have a big emphasis on audio in delivering the overall gaming experience. It is also important to keep in mind that real world gaming effects will be far more intensive on the various sound solutions performance, as action scenes will put an even bigger load on the soundcard's processing power. Considering the SoundStorm is producing true surround sound in all of our tests, it stood up very well against the competition and even managed to take the lead in certain games which is very impressive. We noticed almost a 60% drop in performance with the cheap Cmedia onboard sound solution compared to the best performer which is hardware accelerated.
So why on Earth don't gamers, enthusiasts and computer companies pay attention to these types of sound solution figures as much as they do with GPU performance? It has been the consumer, mostly enthusiasts (just 10 million or so of us around the world) which have forced companies such as ATI and nVidia to work extreme overtime in order to produce the better 3D graphics performance from their GPU's - heck, you've even showed them the value to the point where they will also consider cheating to seemingly produce the better GPU, yet hardly any consideration in comparison is given to sound solutions as far as frames per second influence and true and high quality positional surround sound is concerned.
Why is this happening? The answer seems clear to us. Consumer demand - No company is going to produce something which is more expensive to mass manufacturer unless there is consumer demand for it, especially with the Chinese culture - which is only fair enough. And why is there no consumer demand? There is nowhere near enough mainstream coverage as to the benefits of impressive sound solutions such as nVidia SoundStorm. Most consumers seem happy with their "5.1 sound" but they are not experiencing the ultimate sound performance possible as demonstrated by SoundStorm. It's going to be up to websites such as TweakTown, magazines around the world and consumers to make the change - there will need to be a clear and obvious push for better standards in computer audio for anything to happen.
If there is no push, the vast majority of companies will continue to produce the cheapest audio solutions they can to maximize profits but once the consumer awareness of the type of high quality sound solutions available increases, computer users will not mind spending some extra dollars on their new motherboard knowing full well they can expect to experience proper and true digital surround sound. All Microsoft Xbox games have full Dolby Digital support with the "Xbox Advanced AV Pack" since it uses the SoundStorm for processing so why shouldn't we just expect the same standards for computer gaming?
It seems really simple, doesn't it? Hopefully we have presented a solid argument here today and we hope other tech sites, magazines, marketing people and most importantly consumers take notice and spend more time thinking about computer audio as it's about time we were given consistently better quality computer audio for our gaming needs with nVidia's SoundStorm being a perfect example as to the benefits that can be had in this area.
Totally agree.
For grins and giggles, go download "The Last Ninja" and throw it into your c64 emulator of choice (Vice). The soundtrack on that is absoluetly amazing, and it was made.. what, almost 16 years ago? One of the best gaming soundtracks ever.
For some tracks I can hear the difference between 192kbit and 256kbit mp3's so I'm not quite tone deaf, yet I feel absolutely no urge at all to shell out $$ for a 5.1 soundsystem with 15 speakers all around my PC setup.
For a more immersive experience, good quality head phones will do just fine with medium quality sound hardware, especially if all you need sound for is playing AVI's, MP3's or playing the occasional action game.
I for one was glad when they finally started putting audio as standard on mainboards.
via an expensive high-end Onkyo digital receiver and 5.1 Jamo speaker system
Which just made me laugh. Anyone who thinks Onkyo makes expensive high-end receivers should not really be qualified to do a review. I'm not an audiophile by any means, but I guess they're just letting any highschool kid do these reviews/benchmarks these days....
Since Creative owns a vast patent portfolio it has acquired from Aureal and Sensaura it can effectively dictate the (near) future of 3D PC audio.
Since they have all the patented wave-tracing algorithms Aureal used there won't be any third-party solutions and that means no competition for at least the near future and that means more profit for the shareholders - can't blame them for that.
I owned a MX300 and it was far superior to SB Live!, my personal opinion is that the last good card Creative made was the SB32, the SB64 was a SB32 with a software synth for the extra 32 voices and a proprietary memory expansion slot instead of standard SIMM slots (I recall 2MB upgrade costing $55).
Any comments on the new Audigy cards?
I had enough with the SB PCI series (SB512 anyone?) and switched to Terratec's cards (no SCMS on digital outputs/inputs!) and haven't looked back since.
Good 7.1 sound and the money I saved went towards a GF6800 GT.
Capitalization is the difference between "Helping your uncle jack off a horse" and "Helping your uncle Jack off a horse"
You know, I read a lot of these posts, and had to agree with most people that in general we choose good video quality over sound.
But when I think about it, back in my Evercrack days, what I remember most are the sounds of the gnolls in Blackburrow. I may one day forget what they look like, but I don't think I'll ever forget their howl.
I can tell from page 2 that the authors are biased towards this AMD solution for some reason.
These guys actually try and claim that a $149 add-on card cannot provide 5.1 (6-channel) sound. Seriously, look at their comparison chart. It's so wacked you'd think it was Microsoft's work.
I mean, seriously, for less than $30 you can get a SB Live! 5.1 that will provide a lot of what's being listed on their page 2 chart. And certainly by the time you've reached their $149 price-point you're able to get yourself a nice SB Audigy2 that can do everything they want but hardware AC3 encoding.
And I have to be honest -- is the hardware AC3 encoding really going to be much of an issue for most people? I don't see audio enthusiasts being geared for onboard audio (no matter what it is capable of), and the value segment rarely goes for some fancy surround sound.
Basically, I'm saying this article is bullocks from the second page on. I know it's easier to critisize than to write a good article... but still, these guys seem to be entirely too biased towards this product to make their 'review' worth my time. Personally, I think it's worth a grain of salt.
Now go ahead and mod me down for being a crotchety old man.
/dev/random
You're the idiot. Just what signal do you think TV companies are using?
Video is something that is easily noticeable by an end user. The graphics look better on a monitor. Audio is different, you have to have a good sound system and if you want surround sound you have to have a room suitable for the 6 speaker setup.
Most people don't have surround sound at their computers and never will, I would if I was able to physically have the speakers surrounding me. I can't. Alternatively the only other speakers I can get are 2 satellites plus a sub. No ones offers a 3.1 dolby pro logic setup for computers. We have to make baby steps to surround sound - let's get that centre channel speaker in there.
The only time surround sound will ever become as big of a focus as graphics for developers is when someone can buy a single canister speaker that does surround sound in the entire room.
yeah
THC !!! What have you been smoking ?
They're sure as hell not using S/PDIF--which is what this guy is looking for.
And, he's right. You're a damned idiot if you think a 900Mhz signal is being sent out of your sound card.
It is quite ironic (yes, this is irony, not coincidence) that an article that purports to bemoan the neglect of sound in favor of picture proceeds to rate the audio gear based on how it impacts graphics performance.
That's not irony, that's just fucked up... : p
But then it is an Airport Express optically attached to my very nice AV system.
It *is* possible to get 3D sound with just two speakers/headphones. Headphones are of course much preferable. Finally, humans have just two ears, not five or six. Trick is in the processing - the feeling of space is achieved not only by using intensity but also phase of the sound. The algorithms to do that are known, just Google for HRTF (head-related transfer function) - e.g. here.
If you have a good HRTF and a geometrical model of the space, you can recreate very accurate sound reproduction, with just two speakers/headphones.
EAX and DirectSound took a very rough approximation of HRTF and some rough approximation of the space (e.g. concert hall, church, etc.) and give you list of filters. The effects have nothing to do with reality and you will not get better spatial feeling using even twenty speakers. You do not take into account reflections, material on the walls, standing wave effects etc.
For people interested in accoustic, have a look here. I had a short course with prof. Rindel, who is one of the authors of the ODEON software (there is a free demo on the page) and the stuff is really impressive. It beats things like EAX or very expensive 5.1 setups hands down. If modelling of this sort was supported by hardware, that would be the real revolution in computer audio. BTW, this technology was used as a part of CAHRISMA EU project, which we participated in (for the virtual reality part), the stuff is pretty much usable in real time already ( CAHRISMA at DTU, CAHRISMA at our lab, Something on the VR aspects of the project
Heh, yeah the instruments in those old sound cards were crap. Then there was the time I fired up Doom on the old Pentium 100 i had hooked up to my midi equipment. Doom music played through a modern midi synth with sampled sounds is awesome.
/usr/games/fortune
The L.C.D .doesn't have this equipment. Computers are sold with two speakers, if any, and very few people use them as a "multi-media" unit, prefering their superior home stereos.
A couple problems I see:
The computer is usually not even in the same room as the sound/entertainment system. The computer is a web/email/work machine that doubles as a gaming machine once in a while.
The computer doesn't come bundled with a really nice sound system and if offered, I doubt anyone who cared that much about sound would pay the premium knowing full well their home stereo blows it away, doesnt need reboots, etc.
The same question can be asked of computer game controllers. The consoles do a much better job of delivering games for the L.C.D. that an old fashioned keyboard is just fine for gamers. No need for some killer controller. Of course some would argue the keyboard is superior and that flight simulators need special controllers, but those are niche items. Just because they are niche items doesn't mean they are "dying."
Lastly, there are tons of 5.1 equipment for PCs for people who want them. This assumption that because it doesn't ship with the cheapest dell thus its "dying" is really pushing it.
I can deal with poorer quality sound than I can poorer quality video. My middle-aged ears have been assulted by so much poor quality sound over the years that it has become acceptable.
I do appreciate good sound but it is something that I can do without to save a couple of bucks.
Still I run with sound off on my computer because there are so friggin many cheesy websites that think it is cool to play MIDI music or other sounds.
I only turn up the volume when I want to listen to something. Usually, my inexpensive three speaker system is satisfactory. But, I don't usually play MP3's, DVD's, or CD's from my computer. I have a stereo and a TV for that stuff.
I know, I know that is "old school" but so am I.
FM synth? Please. I agree that the Doom music was great and added to the game, but to really appreciate it you needed a Gravis Ultrasound. There's absolutely no comparison. Of course in this day and age you can run a port like prboom in Linux with GUS patches and get the right music without any special card.
Don't forget about the simpler things that even Joe Average has to deal with. Does the keyboard 'feel' right? What about the mouse? Wireless or not wireless? What about the size of the monitor or just hook up to your TV? Oh and, what kind of sound system should you get to hook up into your sound card?
The sooner this hits -1, the better! My tiny mind has been warped...
I found the review that was posted to be almost completely content-free. All it spoke about was graphics framerates on various games rather than about the audio performance characteristics of each card.
I am much more interested in things like signal to noise ratios, sound quality, sound characteristics, number of useful discrete channels, bitrates, and general compatibility and reliability of cards.
I recently switched from a cheap sound card to an Audigy 2 ZS and was astonished that the hiss I had become used to wasn't in my amplified speakers as I had assumed it was, but in the old sound card. This prompted me to take advantage of the 7.1 support of the Audigy 2 ZS and has since become my primary watching & listening environment for DVDs.
The 96-khz/48-bit sound is also astonishingly clear when listened to with good speakers or headphones.
I have been searching for some time for a review of the various sound cards comparing their quality. I am much more interested in giving up CPU cycles for better sound than the other way around.
Cheers,
Roy
Here'scoral cache link of the origional article.
I think a lot of folks are forgetting that the problem doesn't lie in the sound cards. It's the speakers. I own a Sound Blaster Audigy card which supports 5.1 sound and EAX which is about all you need for most modern games. While I could get a more powerful sound card, realisticly with my speakers I probably couldn't really tell the difference. I have a four point sound setup which is okay. The thing is a matching set of speakers to take advantage of your sound board is usually 10x more expensive than the card itself. Now considering the fact most consumers have el cheapo speakers that are even worse than mine, it's not surprising they don't care that much since a $100 or less creative card will in thoes regards be overkill already.
For grins and giggles, go download "The Last Ninja" and throw it into your c64 emulator of choice (Vice).
I hate the thought that Last Ninja II may already be released when the download over my 150 baud line emulator finishes...
The soundtrack on that is absoluetly amazing, and it was made.. what, almost 16 years ago? One of the best gaming soundtracks ever.
Yeah - enjoy it in new glory. (But please don't torture the little server to much.)
The basic idea is to hook it to a surround receiver, and if a DD sound bitstream is being sent out (like from a game), it aught to be decoded in the receiver... Right? Is there any such thing that exists?
Dude, you really should've read the article.
The nVidia Soundstorm APU is actually the ONLY available product capable of encoding a digital (AC3) surround data stream in real time. And since nVidia apparently doesn't want to incorporate Soundstorm in one of their future chipsets, it looks like we're out of luck. For me, that's a reason to stick with my outdated Athlon XP system and my Soundstorm equipped ASUS motherboard for the time being. I hope nVidia or some other manufacturer will get a clue in the near future and offer a decent PCI sound card with that capability.
Of course, if all you want is a digital output (optical or electrical) on your soundcard, that's pretty easy. Most modern cards have them and should work just fine with Linux. You just won't get real-time encoded AC3 over them.
Everyone from the top down constantly talks about how important audio is. They talk about how it's 30-50% of the experience and how good audio can make or break a game. However, when the rubber hits the road it's the first thing to be cut, it has the lowest portion of the budget, the least amount of people per project, and little to no programming time allocated (why reinvent the wheel right?). Eye candy makes great review fodder and box art. It's time devs stopped paying lip service and actually allocated the resources needed to make audio on par with other elements in games. The excuse that everyone is listening on $10 PC speakers or mono TV speakers is a pile of BS.
They need to get audio folks in on projects at the same time as everyone else. It makes no sense to cram all things audio (planning, design, creation, and implementation) into the last 6 months of a 3 year dev cycle.
...are going to run into the problem that we only have 2 ears. All "surround sound" effects should be able to be emulated with a pair of headphones and a good set of filters, like in Dolby Headphone technology. So any audio hardware is really just going to be doing this kind of thing, and modern CPUs are really getting fast enough that it's not an issue. These days, the primary thing a computer needs to have is a little jack into which headphones can be plugged.
should be mandatory. i have a pc used for multimedia activity (gaming, movies/tv/music) and what i want to see out there is a program to seperate audio channels and effective volume control of those channels. i want to be able to watch a movie on the dvd player in my system, sound through the stereo, and not have to listen to the boops and beeps background programs emit on a regular basis. or webbing while listening to music and the annoying trend in integrated audio in advertising on pages. DOES ANYBODY KNOW OF ANYTHING LIKE THIS?
Hello?
Am I the only one who immidiatly thought of a comic character of indian descent here?
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
We all like to lament the loss of Soundstorm, with it's hardware audio mixing and on the fly dolby digital encoding, but it died for two reasons, one major, one minor.
The big one was marketing. Nvidia failed, on every level, to market and push the Soundstorm APU. It wasn't advertised, it's features and abilities were no explained, and info about it was buried deep within the then current nvidia web page. Nobody knew what it was, and while everyone understood 5.1 sound on a motherboard, no one understood why nvidias was better. And by no one, I include motherboard reviewers, who would talk about the dual channel features and onboard firewire of the nforce chipset, but completely overlook the sound, failing to even mention it in most cases. This feedback lead motherboard manufacturers to question the premium nvidia charged for the solution, and often opt for the cheaper AC'97 chipsets they had in stock instead. Nvidia never published benchmark and review guidelines for the soundstorm, so nobody ever cared about it. They needed to push it's excellence as a gaming and home theater chipset, and it's ability to blend digitally with home audio setups, and never did.
The second reason is, in fact, Creative Labs. To understand, some technical details of the soundstorm are needed. The Soundstorm APU is a semi-custom DSP, not a dedicated audio solution. It runs a customized version of the Sensaura 3D engine, doing all the work on APU that is normally left to Sensaura versions that run within the drivers of other soundcard makers. Additionally, the final mix stage of this engine has had the Dolby Digital Live encoder added, allowing the 5.1 output to be packed into an AC-3 stream. In other words, Nvidia was dependent on Sensaura technology. Now, guess who just bought Sensaura? That's right! Creative Labs. Do you think they'll be licensing their new acquisition to the one company that actually competes with them? Now, they'll keep licensing it to other AC'97 makers, because who wouldn't want a cut of every motherboard ever made, and the opportunity to make more when they buy a creative soundcard to replace it?
So, it's dead. Replacing the Sensaura engine with an in house solution isn't possible, as there is to much contamination of IP, nvidia would have to hire all new dev's and engineers to clean room it. Licensing from Creative will be prohibitively expensive, and motherboard makers aren't interested in it anyway.
Why not make a PCI version? Well, the PCI bus can't handle 64 16bit/48Khz audio streams, that's more bandwitdth than PCI has. It worked fine on soundstorm, thanks to the fast north-southbridge link. You could produce a PCIe 1x card version, but nvidia would have to re-engineer a good deal of the chip to do so, and then we are back to licensing anyway.
Nvidia never made Soundstorm enough of a brand to be worth noticeing, and then killed it when the costs got to high and the support got to difficult. Strangely, drivers for the soundstorm have finally matured, with the most recent 4.31 audio producing decent sound and having wide compatibility. Ah well, looks like our next hope is the highly DRM protected Intel HDA standard. At elast it offers realtime dolby digital. Sort of.
What's the point when games like Doom 3 don't even use EAX or other sound-modelling technologies? Half-Life 1 back in '99 was doing echoes and reverb based on the size of the room, and even now in 2004, a game like Doom 3 still plays its sounds effects raw, like you're in a closet.
Doom 3 really suffered to me because when I blasted a shotgun or heard an Imp shriek in those shiny metallic rooms, it didn't sound like I was in a shiny metallic room.
It is one of the pet peeves of mine that the word COAXIAL is used to refer to so many different types of cables, that it can sometimes be confusing. This is what may have the parent AC confused.
While you CAN convert a normal 1.5mm (hereafter referred to as miniplug) female jack that 99% of people have on their sound cards to a what he refers to as coaxial cables (coaxial in this instance meaning the kind of cable that your cable television and internet use to come into the house, or that older televisions have as their only input), you gain nothing by doing this other than the ability to run the cables a long distance without any degradation. Though those coaxial cables may HAVE a theoretical bandwidth of 900mhz (or higher I'm not entirely sure) you'll never be using more than 22khz of that bandwidth.
What TFA is talking about is the coaxial cables used for digital sound, the format which is used by Sony and Phillips (hence the SPDIF, Sony-Phillips Digital Interface). This carries sound digitally at 44khz inbetween different consumer devices and also allows for different kinds of surround encoding such as DTS. The other format for carrying digital sound inbetween consumer devices is called optical, or more correctly TOSlink, and is supported by the rest of the manufacturers that didn't want to pay royalties to Sony/Phillips for using their patented standard. Optical also carries sound at 44khz and can support the same kinds of encoding as SPDIF can.
now the ON topic part of this post:
It is sad to see that the SoundStorm audio solution may not be carried on, as I thought it was the first real innovation in the computer sound industry in a long time. Even the DECENT onboard sound solutions had always used CPU cycles to encode the sound information provided by games to a theater standard surround setup such as DTS. The fact that Soundstorm can do this without any CPU time was a major boon to me as far as buying an Nforce2 chipset based board. Without the soundstorm, to get correctly positioned audio to my receiver I had to run both analog AND digital cables to my receiver and then switch between inputs on the receiver depending on whether I was gaming or watching a DVD.
That's so bullshit.
Having never really liked creative I didn't really feel like supporting them and purchasing an audigy 2 when I built my new computer to get correctly positional audio, so the Soundstorm enabled Nforce2 boards really fit the bill. I'll be sad to see it go, but I can understand how computer audio for most people is definitely a low priority.
It is my hope that the better class of mainboard makers (asus, abit, etc.) who make higher end boards for people who custom build will continue to provide the hardware required for the SoundStorm audio, and that Nvidia will keep the specification in the Nforce chipset. The best way to get this done is to continue to support manufacturers that realize there definitely IS a subset of people who would NOT like the cheapest quality components for the most important part of their system, and are willing to pay a premium for that.
*sigh* ranting done, when it all comes down to it, I guess it's always money that talks. It seems that the money (vote) of the consumer dollar is less and less powerful against the money (vote) of the corporate dollar. Why should it be any different overseas ?
have ya'll not heard about intel's HD audio?
24-bit/96khz
dolby digital 7.1
eax 2.0
supports microsoft's UAA
there are only three problems with HD audio that i can see:
1) eax 2.0 only (creative is about to release eax 5.0)
2) mediocre SNR with first-generation silicon
3) very cpu hungry compared with audigy2 and envy24
i've never been enthralled with eax, so for me #1 isn't such a big deal. #2 and #3 will be mitigated by future hardware and drivers (and besides, cpu power is abundant and cheap).
with hd audio, the audio problem is basically solved. we've been getting diminishing returns from all this whiz-bang new audio tech for a while now. so what's the big deal?
Disappointed by the state of game and PC audio and want to do something about it?
There exists a huge disconnect between state of the art audio research and the state of sound implemented in commercial hardware, system software and applications.
To help change this I (with the help of many) have created, href=http://audioanecdotes.com>Audio Anecdotes, a series of books presenting theory, algorithms, and advice from the experts. Where possible articles are accompanied by working, open-source, portable (we support Windows, Mac OSX and Linux) source code implementations.
For those familiar with Andrew Glassner's popular Graphics Gems Series, Audio Anecdotes is a Graphics Gems for sound.
Audio Anecdotes Volume1 is in stores (try Amazon's search inside the book to have a quick look), and Volume2 will be available soon.
Series topics include: physics of sound propagation, perception of sound, sound synthesis, voice synthesis, synchronization, spatial 3D audio, signal processing, music theory, composition, sound for film, sound recording the effect of sound on the body and mind, and more.
Advanced techniques like beam steering, echo and crosstalk cancellation are now being worked on for a future volume.
This is a community contributed work, please participate! We need researchers, engineers, and other audio practitioners to write articles, programmers to help develop demonstration code. We especially need help developing our cross platform build on Linux and Mac OSX environments.
Please email me directly at keng@sworks.com if you have any feedback or would like to participate.
I played Doom when it first came out through a SoundBlaster 16 and a Yamaha PSR-510. The 510's keyboard was crap, but the AWM GMIDI samples were pretty good -- and Doom sounded *GREAT*. Even better than SB16 + WaveBlaster.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Nice on those Audigy 2 ZS how when you install the software it dials home (using flash.)
This especially pisses me off when I paid so much for this stupid card. (I will not buy creative again, I will buy PRO shit next time)
I had InetReg.exe and RegFlash.exe renamed to InetReg.e and RegFlash.e
to finally break the endless loop.
After that the card worked well.
Need a fast box (3.2Ghz) or don't think about using EAX.
And some of the high end shit (192k Audio) only works in CERTAIN OS's that I don't use... how fscking annoying.
Why the excitement over hardware Dolby Digital 5.1 "cinema quality" encoding? As far as the benchmarks show there isn't that much of a difference between the SoundStorm that is so loved by the authors and the cheapest 5.1 onboard card. Even so, the sound is far from being supreme and not that great compared to an Audigy 2 or a TerraTec Aureon.
All your Sybase are belong to us.
One word: Diablo.
the greatest crime is that we have done NOTHING to enable network syncronization of audio.
cpu processing, special effects, fancy mixers. all these features are simply pieces of silicon ripe for the molding. but they are nothing novel. they are not signifcant advancements; they are merely luxuries most consumers are too ignorant to demand. they are not advancements!
what we need is a sound system which is actually more functional! one which is ADVANCED, bears features as of yet unseen:
a computer should be able to declare, "play this audio file at 09:00 exactly", and every computer should be able to start playing in perfect tune. AND, even for a 100 hour sample, it should stay in relative harmony. the ONE time i got two computers to start playing a file in harmony, the two systems drifted apart so that by the end of the 4 minute tune they were quite painfully out of phase.
yes, this is a problem computer networks were never meant to tackle. still, i believe there could be potential solutions short of atomic clocks in every computer.
May I suggest a Roland SC-55 instead of your old adlib card? They're much better, are relatively cheap nowadays and they even run off the serial port.
"It is my hope that the better class of mainboard makers (asus, abit, etc.) who make higher end boards for people who custom build will continue to provide the hardware required for the SoundStorm audio, and that Nvidia will keep the specification in the Nforce chipset. The best way to get this done is to continue to support manufacturers that realize there definitely IS a subset of people who would NOT like the cheapest quality components for the most important part of their system, and are willing to pay a premium for that.
*sigh* ranting done, when it all comes down to it, I guess it's always money that talks. It seems that the money (vote) of the consumer dollar is less and less powerful against the money (vote) of the corporate dollar. Why should it be any different overseas ? "
Ummm...excuse me? You first talk about people paying a premium (a larger monetary vote) then lament later about the consumer's monetary vote being lesser against the corporate monetary vote.
Maybe the ass you should be kicking is the consumers, not the corporations.
My Wife who is a Ph.D. Clinical Psychologist, told me that when she was in graduate school she worked in a lab run by Dr. Honeydue and that his assistant was Beaker. Those were not their real names, which the Muppets changed to protect themselves from lawsuits, but that was them. They worked at large hospital in New York City and that is the only clue I am going to give you.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
I may be a little behind the times with this since it's eben a while since I've used an nForce2 under Linux, but last time I checked nVidia's Linux drivers for the SoundStorm APU didn't include those for a hardware mixer; hence mixing of multiple audio streams must be done via a software mixer like arts.
If nVidia can't be arsed to release the specs to the ALSA/OSS guys *or* produce a half decent driver themselves, then I'm gonna stick to my Audigy cards for the time being.
Disclaimer: I'm usually a huge fan of nVidia's drivers (having had nothing but good experiences with them), and can understand their binary-only-ness. But it's not like soundcards are a hotly contested area of computing at the moment, and it strikes me that nVidia is shooting themselves in the foot a bit with this rather annoying issue. Under Windows the SoundStorm is a helluva sound chip.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
Is there any such thing that exists?
You mean like a bog standard OEM Creative SB Live! using AC3 passthrough thats been in the driver for ohhh, years now? Co-axial digital out. People are using them all over the place. Whats so hard about it?
You mean like a bog standard OEM Creative SB Live! using AC3 passthrough thats been in the driver for ohhh, years now? Co-axial digital out. People are using them all over the place. Whats so hard about it?
Because it's not real time encoding and only works when you already have an encoded AC3 stream, such as when you're watching a DVD. It will NOT work with games.
IS THAT SO HARD TO UNDERSTAND, COCKGOBBLER?
Maybe if we looked through the cache instead.
So, PCI has more than enough bandwidth for silly numbers of audio streams; it's just that no-one bothers with serious audio.
I appear to have a blog. Odd.
One thing that shits me with gaming audio is that in the games I've played, all the effects, monsters, etc ALL SOUND THE SAME.
Eg in doom, each type of sound is exactly the same, only slightly pitch shifted. The same goes for the quake series - every sound only differs with a little pitch. Whether the surrounding geography is a small room or a huge hall, it sounds the same.
what I want to see is true dynamic audio - each sound effect being created dynamically out of base sounds, so that each time you hear a particular effect, it's sound varies according to the immediate geography - big booming echoes in large halls, crisp, close and loud shrieks in small spaces.
THAT is what would make audio advance in gaming to the next level.
Sparks:Gadget:Beer Maker
I specifically didn't like DOOM's music on a non-FM midi setup. I liked how "Overdriven Guitar" as per FM sounded, with a nasty, disturbed edge. Anything more than that just tamed it too much. It's supposed to sound twisted, and FM synth definitely twists it.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
surround sound through SDL, ALSA or OSS. Because I can't think of one.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Its true. The sound processor in the C64 still runs rings around anything in a PC. It was used in commercial music synthesizers of that era. And I bet it's sound processor could still be used for for such today.
IIRC, Turtle Beach 5.1 sound cards have a "Versa-jack" that can function as Line-out 3, (Center/Sub IIRC) Line-in 2, or SP/DIF out. all you need is to convert the minijack to a single RCA connector. (The right channel on a stereo one might work
same applies to Creative Live Series, look on the back panel. Live cards also support third-party add-ons that include the functions you desire directly
From a Sound Designer's perspective a much larger issue and limitation to "What's up with computer audio?" is that most of the market is driven by game sound and the status of what is regarded as 'State-Of-The-Art' in game sound render is laughable to be generous.
To be fair, until recently sound render capability and fidelity in games has really not been much of a concern with good reason; games and game design haven't offered the level of play detail and subtlety to take advantage of much more then crude 'positional' sound render capabilities, and as far as fidelity is concerned most game Fans listen to game sound on the most abject sound hardware as far as fidelity is concerned even when under the illusion they have purchased State-Of-The-Art rig.
There are a slew of issues and challenges unique to game sound rendering that will only be overcome when some generous or concerned Developers and Programmers assumes the onus of seriously addressing them -- to date no one has. Fundamental issues and serious limitations of game sound render that bring it in way below the bar of what's technically feasible can be summarized (in no particular order):
limited dynamic range (due to the following)
crude sub-mixing of multiple sound channels
gross compression/companding
simplistic, crude compression and companding algorithms
gross interactions between mixer, compression and companding
lack of sound and level designer control over aforesaid parameters
complete lack of even the most basic engineering documentation of the aforesaid
no (or very crude) steridian based boundary effects
use of cheap canned DSP & positional libraries
very poor perspective (first to third person) and proximity effects
crap-tastic tools (worst in the industry)
no security
poor sync
undocumented black-box sound manipulation
As just about everything that can be wrong with sound render in games is wrong even the smallest concerted attempt at addressing some some of these issues with the crudest of solutions would be a [i]God Send[/i]. In many cases issues and limitation of crusty sound renderer 'back planes' and features could be overcome by the simple expedient of documenting how they perform and at the very least offering Sound & Level Designers means to disable mixer compression, ACG, and DSP effects and features, and create or adjust these effects statically/manually.
Arguably the largest issue confronting fidelity in game sound render is having automated dynamic mixing of an indefinite and changing number of sound sources, of dynamic position and not have them overload. In essence sound renderers are required to automate the task of live show Sound Engineer that is setting up for multiple performers, performing different kinds of music with different instruments, different number of performers in each ensemble, and different musical genera on-the-fly -- a virtually impossible task with no automation, only crude DSP, and very crude compression schemes.
The current solution has bee to use massive amounts of audio compression and companding (not to be confused with digital file compression) reducing dynamic range on a heinous scale -- and while this is a better sounding solution gross digital overload -- the dynamic range achieved and double digit distortion figures obviate any need for high fidelity audio hardware beyond the cheapest EAX compatible card and discount headphones that aren't physically painful to wear. The surround sound processing offered by even the best audio hardware and game renderers is little more then laughable marketing gimmick to be polite.
The value of decent sound render performance capability won't be readily apparent unless or until it's available for a capable Sound Designer and Game Designer to collaborate and exploit and the results won't be the 'knock your socks off' kind of thing like HUGE explosions and cheap positional panning effects of jets, or magical plasma balls screaming past or behind yo
It's actually 2 parts:
1. Marketing: Trade shows, and when games are plugged on TV, it's very rarely the games sounds. It's normally a mix tape providing some audio to set the mood. Often techno, or hard rock. The focus in this case needs to be the graphics. Graphics are what makes the game look attractive in these important media outlets. Graphics are what sell. The audio is a mere bonus.
2. People don't care as much about sound. Not to many people have a 5.1 system hooked up to their computer. More and more college kids have a laptop now. This means the 18-21 crowd has intel integrated audio, rather than high tech audio PCI cards. And quite often headphones are used.
Audio is expensive. Between a card (which isn't to bad), and expensive speakers. Video is mainly the card.
If you have to sacrifice one, most people pick audio. Because having a low frame rate stinks. But playing a game on mute (and having the football game on tv instead) is more desirable.
It's marketing. People care more about video, so that's the focus. Drastically less is audio. So that's why audio is 'forgotten'.
Yeah, except the games themselves are hard as hell. =(
But I can definitely recommend the soundtracks for the whole Last Ninja series. LN1 had amazing soundtrack. LN2 had even better. LN3, while I never thought that was possible, was even better than that. The Central Park theme of Last Ninja 2 has the Best Synthetic Electric Guitars Ever(tm). The intro to LN3 is probably the very embodiment of Real Ultimate Power. (You've got to see the intro to believe it. I'll try to sneak the game to my real C64 and see that it actually runs - I still sometimes think the video I've seen is a modern fake =)
As for other great C64 soundtracks, try Rob Hubbard's ...anything (Mega Apocalypse is my favorite), Richard Joseph's Barbarian (far more Conan than Conan itself!), Wally Beben's Tetris (No recycled Russian songs here!) and just about anything by Jeroen Tel (I got to know his music through Golden Axe - can you imagine the crummy little home version of the game to have better music than the arcade version?)
Lets travel back, way back. There was the Adlib audio. Then Creative Labs introduced the 8bit, 11Khz Sound Blaster, then the Sound Blaster Pro which added stereo. Then there was the Sounds Blaster 16, Pro Audio Spectrum 16, and the Gravis Ultrasound (GUS) back in 1991.
The GUS was way ahead of the others. It could mix up to 32 channels in hardware. It always played the sound back at 44Khz via interpolation (unless you had too many channels active at once). It had up to 1meg of on board sound memory so it could be totally independent of your CPU. The Demo scene loved it. It had faked 3d sound via QSound..
It never caught on :( Creative's control was too powerful. Even the GUS PnP which was based on the AMD Interwave sound chip failed. Eventually Gravis was bought and the exited the sound business.
Years later Aureal, attempted to bring good audio to the PC and break Creative's control with its Vortex sound card. They ran into money issues. Creative sued them. They won, but the lawsuit drained their money and they went bankrupt. Creative then bought the remains (patents) of the company.
But rumours are nVidia hired many of the out of work engineers, which developed the Sound Storm for the Xbox. Which then nVidia fortunately brought to the nForce. Which unfortunately won't be in future versions because nobody is willing to pay for it. Even if it is "free". Gamers are more interested in a "free" hardware firewall.
Looking back at how Gravis, AMD, Aureal, and others have failed despite having superior products makes me wounder how a company could successfully introduce better audio to gamers. Maybe if it helped you win at FPS games... Seeing nVidia leave the audio market is sad, but I've been sad about this many times before. I'm kind of numb to the pain of seeing a great new technology with high hopes of making things better fail due to lack of interest.
I have a feeling we'll be stuck using Intel's "Azalea" for a long long time. It's certainly not bad, but it has the CPU do the work instead of a coprocessor. What do you expect from Intel when they made a nice new DX9 graphics core, but didn't use hardware T&L? Gotta try to create a market for those faster CPUs somehow... Sure, it can output some Dolby signals if they are precomputed (i.e. DVDs), but it can't encode them if they are dynamic (i.e. games). Unless you have a really powerful CPU. Oh well, at least Intel High Definition Audio as it is officially known now beats AC'97.
As my manager told me while working as the audio technology guy at atari coin-op...
"There called video games, not audio games."
I had no rebutle.
Big deal for those of us with HT recievers connected to our computers.
By connecting digitally, you leave all the analog interference in the case of the PC. Also I now use all the Digital/Analog stages of my Denon HT reciever, which are better quality than any reasonably priced sound card.
Try to do the same with any other sound card and you only get stereo through digital. Soundstorm lets you get 5.1 channels through digital.
First, AC3 decoding already exist on many computer audio hardware, AC3 can ONLY be "done on the fly" and their surround positioning example picture made me choke, surround speakers must be behind, roughly each midway between center and side front speakers, not in front midway between your chair and tv! ...
This article is irrevelant and you shouldn't buy stuff according to what you find in it.
Btw I am an audio engineer.
Last month during QuakeCon it became clearly apparent that computer audio has become somewhat of a forgotten component in the computer industry when talking to gamers and listening to companies at the gaming event.
Obviously they didn't talk to the guys from Creative Labs selling and giving away their Soundblaster Audigy 2 cards, or the guys from Zalman showing off the 5.1 headphones. And maybe they didn't notice that 30% of the people at the event had very expensive Sennheiser headphones. They seem to have just talked to nvidia and the people buying the 6800s (or trying to win one) who care more about the video than audio.
While I was at the event I went to Fry's and purchased some nice Bose headphones to replace my Koss', they sound GREAT, I noticed a lot of people bought new headphones during the event as well. Anyway I wish their site had more info on the general consensus of computer audio at quakecon rather than rely on the future plans of a company whose primary focus is video cards.
I don't know about your TV company, but mine just gives me coax, so there's no sound card line out style 1.5mm jack anywhere. Or are you saying the TV companies run all their audio through a 1.5mm jack bottleneck at the station? That's just plain stupid.
Finally, somebody who points out the big elephant standing amidst the audio chip havyweights.
5.1 AC-3 Encoding is the next big step.
Out of my own ignorance, I bought an AC-3 home theater decoder setup for my main computer, only to find my expensive (when purchased) Audigy didn't support 5.1 DIGITAL SOUND for anything but DVD playback.
How useless is that?
What it meant was that, for games, I'd have to switch to analog input (with it's attendent rat's nest of wires, noise, etc...) and for movies, I'd have to use digital output. WTF? That's totally asinine.
Here, I figured with a so-called "5.1" audio card, (3rd generation, at that!!) I'd be able to simply remove the rat's nest and plug in the digital connection - simple, no fuss audio, with brilliant, vibrant 5.1 audio, sounding the way it was MEANT to sound.
Instead of real progress, we get this nonsense about higher sample rates and pointless signal-to-noise (which doesn't mean squat with 12 wires running analog audio to an amplifier) ratios. Worse is the idiotic "5.1 headphone" garabage, which only obfuscates the matter even more.
Hey, Creative, Crystal, Turtle Beach, etc...: I'll pay $150-200 for a true 5.1 audio card. I want that card to have DIGITAL 5.1 OUTPUT for ALL Computer generated audio.
Until then, I'll probably be satisfied with on-the-motherboard audio solutions instead of shelling out for Creative Labs or Turtle Beach cards, as I used to in the past. If the big Audio Card developers can't deliver REAL imrovements in computer audio technology (particularly developments that should have been here 5 years ago), then they don't deserve our business, and can go straight to hell, for all I care.
I remember Wolf3D being the first game to make me jump. And the last. Nothing since has come close.
When those damn SS guys suddenly stepped out in front of you from behind a wall or door or wherever, yelling "SHUTZSTAFFEL!", or whatever the hell it was, I'd let out a "WAH!" and leap half off my chair!
Goddam game took years off my life, I'm sure of it.
All the misconceptions about on-board sound must have done them in. Because slashdotters are repeating them a lot here ( on board sound is poor quality).
When I heard about Nforce, it became my motherboard of choice. For about 10$ more than a competing solution I could get a sound solution equal to a $100 card thrown in. To me I just saved $90.
Now I expected the enthusiast community to embrace this solution like there was no tomorrow. But they didn't. Creative seems to have worked a miracle of brainwashing to convince the majority that on board sound sucks.
I don't know how else to explain people shelling out $100+ on redundant sound cards.
The Soundstorm solution has equal processing power with the best cards out there and its relative cost is 90% less. Other than the misconception that onboard sound is flawed, what is leading folks to spend 10 times as much as they had to on sound?
My soundstorm is connected to my Denon receiver via SPDIF out. Sound quality is Superb. Beyond reproach.
I will keep using my Soundstorm board for another couple of years in hopes of some resurgence in this kind of technology. I will actually delay upgrading, since this aspect of future motherboards is actually a step backward for the short term future.
"1 AC-3 Encoding is the next big step.
Hey, Creative, Crystal, Turtle Beach, etc...: I'll pay $150-200 for a true 5.1 audio card. I want that card to have DIGITAL 5.1 OUTPUT for ALL Computer generated audio."
You appear to be the perfect target customer for Soundstorm. Did you buy one? For under $100 you can get those capabilities in a motherboard, so why would you want to pay $150 for a soundcard that does the same???
I am just curious. I really don't understand why someone would willingly pay large amounts for something they could have had for next to no cost (perhaps $10 more than your current MB).
"Audio is expensive. "
That still doesn't explain why a solution that offers high quality and is cheap would fail.
Soundstorm boards are maybe $10 more than a comparative board without it.
I have recently used EAX 2.0 emulation on an ADI soundmax (Asus) P4 motherboard within call of duty.
After extensive testing of the sounds in "Miles 2D positional" vs EAX 1/2 (emulation of course, being that it's not a creative sound card) I was SURPRISINGLY impressed with EAX - I'd always been a naysayer and general creative hater but I have to choke on my own words.
While ANY old sound card (nowadays) can output to 6 speakers and DirectSound3d (Doom 3) can give you surround sound without EAX - it's the EFFECTS that the EAX added to the audio that impressed me.
I don't know the fancy terms, but I beleive it's "culling" "occlusion" and just plain old muffling - but hot damn! the sound coming from behind me SOUNDED like it was behind me so much more and much much easier to pinpoint.
Using call of duty and map "hurtgen" (load your save or just type "map hurtgen" into the console) you run through a forest with mortars landing behind you in the snow, I couldn't have enjoyed the audio more in a game.
Also good positional audio helped me play so much more when a bad guy comes from behind you, or even infront of you to the left but you hear his missed shot strike behind you to the right - etc.
With a good setup (5.1) it reminds me of the days in Doom 1, when I first upgraded an SB Pro (Stereo) instead of an SB 2.0 (mono) the difference is that big again.
To me, not having rear sound in a game now means I won't play it - period, it's like playing a 2D game or sprite based game without it.
Finally, interestingly I actually am using analog cabling and a "proper" Pioneer VSX D711 receiver along with only 4 speakers (thank god for phantom channels) but they are half decent speakers http://www.dansdata.com/m4kit.htm
I agree for the most part.
They should have never did the mix and match and had some Nforce with and some without soundstorm. It confused the issue.
But still it would have been hard. I think many of those who wanted the specific unique feature (Dolby Digital encoding) figured out this was the chipset to have. I picked an Nforce soley because of this feature and I love it. Hooked up to my Denon my computer serves as a media center delivering fantastic sound for music, 5.1 movies and gaming all through 1 digital connection.
But I think the market for that feature may be somewhat small. And marketing may not have saved them. They were fighting an uphill battle against the misconception that onboard sound must be terrible.
Peter
Ahem,
"I can tell from page 2 that the authors are biased towards this AMD solution for some reason."
Ummm. It is an article largely about the rather Unique Soundstorm technology. Nvidia didn't have an Intel chipset licence. So it only exists in an AMD chipset and the Xbox BTW. It is not AMD bias.
"These guys actually try and claim that a $149 add-on card cannot provide 5.1 (6-channel) sound."
Nope, No where in the article do they state that. they are talking about Encoding. No card under $200 does realtime Dolby Digital encoding. Soundstorm is the only solution I am aware of.
" is the hardware AC3 encoding really going to be much of an issue for most people?"
It is for anyone who wants to connect with the AC3 capable receiver. I would be part of that group. My computer and home entertainment systems are integrated. This will is the wave of the future IMO.
I'm all for cutting-edge audio technology, but the big problem is that nobody has it. And while nobody has the hardware, nobody is going to make a game that requires it. Effort is better spent in basic audio support: quality of audio samples and software mixers - because everyone who runs the game will benefit.
But I almost think the bigger problem is that all of this audio technology is a way to *reduce* the quality of the audio samples. Motion blur, focus effects, lens flares and such crap are annoying graphical effects as they reduce the clarity of the graphics. And in the same way: occlusion, reverb and various filters are annoying effects as they reduce the clarity of the audio. You take perfect samples and mess them up. Clear sounds in, crap sounds out.
Don't forget that even movie soundtracks are mixed for clarity of sound - not realism. Because it makes no sense for half the audience to be saying "huh? what did he say?" Same for games. In real life, people working in giant industrial complexes (such as those found in Doom 3) all wear ear protection to mask out the horrible echoy machinery and construction sounds.
It might be possible for games to replicate complicated audio environments - but I'm not sure that's what the players really want. IMHO, positional sounds, maybe some basic occlusion are worth doing - but not much more.
It starts off with the premise that SoundStorm is "the benchmark" to judge all other audio cards against. And then SoundStorm loses in all but one benchmark.
Shouldn't the BEST card be "the benchmark"?!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Actually the column he's refering to on the second page does indeed claim that there are no $99-149 cards on the market that provide support for more than 4 speakers.
Look at the chart on page two. Assuming you can read English.
I've took a look at one of the EAX demonstrations that came with one of my soundcard - in general, it was a simple footstep playback with modified effects for different surfaces or environments. These effects, as far as I could tell, were simple variations on a theme that used different methods of echoing, muffling and other things that could easily be implemented in software (even if there is more CPU overhead).
The same cam apply to video cards. Software rendering can produce images that look just as good as standard DirectX/OpenGL rendering (if not better.) The cost is that this rendering takes more time than the accellerated counterpart, but is still possible.
(Also, I heard something about Q-Sound as well with one of my 1996-era sound cards. There were differences, but not something that I could compare that easily in a personal sense - the only difference I remember would be a "demo" that showed some improved doppler effect for "Secert Weapons of the Luftwaffe". Likewise, this is just a simple adjustment in sound that can be done by software as well. )
Of course you're right, but EAX is a _STANDARD_ that games developers can use right now in order to apply these effects to audio in a game.
Couple that with DS3D and you've got muffled footsteps behind oyu instead of (in your case) muffled footsteps from speakers in front of you that MIGHT be from behind you.
Honestly that COD map says it all for me, I'm totally sold on at LEAST 4 speakers for people from now on, it's just great.
"If you say that a sound system has seven channels then i and a lot of other non-audiophiles will have very little idea what exactly that means or how it differes from more or less channels."
That's not a fair comparison.
A fairer comparison would be the effect of the number of parallel pipelines in the gpu on image quality.
And I don't think either of those should have an impact on output quality, but may impact performance (if you have to play more sounds simulataneously than you have channels, you're going to have to do software mixing, slowing the cpu).
Or were you talking about output channels (eg. 5.1, 7.1, etc.)? A comparison for that would be comparing the max possible resolution and frequency your video card is capable of sending to a monitor (which is generally not at all useful, since you are almost always limited by your monitor's capabilities, not the video card).
A fairer comparison would be knowing the sample rate, bitrate, amount and type (odd order, even order, etc.--some types sound better than others) of THD, dynamic range, frequency range, output impedance, and hardware mixing losses, and that should give you a good idea of how good a sound card is.
...or did that whole "benchmark" really just come off as a SoundStorm add? Kinda made me sick...
What I don't get is their reasoning. So right now, the SoundStorm is capable of taking a 5.1 signal and encoding it into Dolby Digital (which will later be decoded by a reciever, blah blah).
Later...
No other computer sound solution on the market is capable of doing this - Creative can do this with their EAX positional surround sound via enhancing the signal along analog cables...
Absolutely not. I have a creative Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS (normal/platinum/platimum pro make no difference... same board) using a digital output to a 4.1 Cambridge Soundworks speaker system and I get plenty of surround sound in games. You can do 5.1, 7.1, etc through the digital output as well.
They also contradict themselves...
Onboard sound solutions utilizing their digital SPDIF output can only output to the front two speakers as without an encoded 5.1 signal from the computer end beforehand, what is being sent through your digital optical/coax cable is limited to stereo (two channels) of sound... so you can kiss your surround sound in games goodbye.
Then later, when commenting about DVD player software...
This software has an option in the settings to allow your audio to be outputted in a RAW untouched format called "SPDIF".
So basically SPDIF is a raw, untouched format (which isn't what they said beforehand), but is only capable of 2 channels? Then, as they're saying it, all audio is basically 2 channels and somehow APU's or sofware magically convert that into a 5.1 surround sound. Interesting.
I just had to add this in...
The only way you can achieve proper positional surround sound in gaming with all other sound solutions on the market apart from the mighty SoundStorm is to utilize their analogue outputs (centre/sub, front, & rear jacks) but then it is not digital so you don't get the true to life effects of proper digital.
Again, no. The Audigy 2 ZS (along with my old SB Live!) had digital outputs.
Hear Hear....
I was about to post something very similar, but you've said it better than I was going to.
I think most of the problem with the sound arena is that it's very hard to get meaningful quantative benchmarks. It's not like "the better the soundcard the better the sample rate" (at least not in a comparable way to framerates with video). It comes down to a much more subjective evaluation. This means the companies can't say "our product is x times better than their product" or similar claims. They have to fall back on more vague qualatative arguments.
I lay awake last night wondering where the sun had gone, then it dawned on me.
Try the Wolfson DACs (hi-resolution mode) on the Chaintech AV-710, a $27 soundcard, using this guide to setup the driver: http://www4.head-fi.org/forums/showthread.php?t=75 655
There's also the EMU 1212u model for around $200 if you are interested in high recording quality as well.
Audigy 2 is pretty crappy value, but is suitable for 3d gaming because it wins out in the low cpu utilization category.
Isn't nVidia's Soundstorm still used in XBOX?
Be aware that Soundstorm is NOT featured on ANY of the nforce3 chipsets. You must use nforce2.
For my 2nd computer, my sound art student partner is using nforce2 soundstorm with DD encoding to hook up to a Dolby Digital amp that only has the coax in, i.e. no 5 analogue inputs. With this amp, the nforce2 soundstorm is presently the only thing available on the market today that can let her edit sound in 5 channel surround in Sony Vegas Video.
I bought a nforce3 250 for myself and updated the audio straight away. However for all its greatness even the audigy2 platinum cannot encode Dolby Digital on the fly. Lucky I have a Create mini amp for my surround gaming [Doom3 is totally wicked sound wise], otherwise I'd be stuffed.
I'm pissed off myself that soundstorm was dropped after nforce2.
ISO certified == THX certified
From Dolby's press release:
From the SoundStorm-worshipping article:TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You should review some 24bit Audio Interfaces, such as the Layla, Gina, Delta Series, or MOTU even.
You get what you pay for!
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
Onboard sound does what most users need it to do--spit out a decent stereo signal with decent specs.
But people who think development has ceased or even slowed in audio card development have obviously never investigated pro audio.
I use a $1000 RME Multiface/Hammerfall DSP and it not only has better HF definition than the average stock card, it has better latencies, multiple forms of digital and analog I/O, optical S/PDIF, ADAT, etc. But form follows function. The average person doesn't need this. Consumer soundcards are cheap because they don't have to be complex. I'm GLAD they're cheap. If I'm building a non-audio PC for someone, I can get a soundcard for peanuts.
I'd love to see some product utilize real-time DTS :)
:)
ES encoding. I'll be damned if I'm going to have 8
cables from the back of my computer to my receiver
for 7.1. I'd rather use 1 S/PDIF cable and either
Dolby Digital EX (worst case) or DTS-ES Discrete
and sacrafice 1 channel, and I'm sure I'm not
alone
The rear center channel in Dolby Digital EX isn't
even discrete (it's matrix, like the way the rear
channel is extrapolated from a stereo source in
Pro Logic I)... I don't see what the big push on
real-time Dolby Digital encoding is, if the
current trend is to move toward 7.1 for PC sound
cards? DTS is easier to encode in real-time too...
The PS2 isn't capable of real-time Dolby Digital
but some games utilize real-time DTS encoding.
I wish more sound card mfg.'s (especially
Creative) would start to move away from on-board
Dolby Digital/DTS decoding and move to encoding!
Given the choice between a multi-function A/V
receiver for $500 and a PC sound card for $300
(that only does 1 thing and only when your noisy
computer's on), the receiver wins hands down! The
only thing real-time decoding is promoting is the
lack of decoder hardware on "computer" 5.1/7.1
speaker systems and an ever growing tangle of
wires behind your computer
Last Ninja 2, for me is the definitive C64 audio experience - I recorded the whole soundtrack to CD =]
For all sorts of SID goodness check out the High-Voltage SID Collection, though you probably already know about it if you can name SID composers =]
I used the Yamaha DB50XG hardware XG synth card. As an added bonus, it unloaded the CPU to make the game run smoothly. The hardware XG synth has some great sounds. If I remember correctly it used a 18 bit DA converter so it's resolution is more than a Compact Disk. Overall, nice sound and light CPU load. This was especialy important on older ISA hardware.
I've since made the synth an external stand alone sound module which I use with a MIDI keyboard.
The truth shall set you free!
an article that purports to bemoan the neglect of sound in favor of picture proceeds to rate the audio gear based on how it impacts graphics performance.
I noticed that. In some of the graphs they even included frame rates of the sound cards and without a sound card. What gives? It would be better to note sound lag, pops, noise, hiss, silent pauses, and such against several video cards and without a video card.
The truth shall set you free!
Wipeout? (Dust Brothers, New Order, Orbital, Manic Street Preachers, ...)
Wipeout 2097? (Future Sound of London, Chemical Brothers, Underworld, Daft Punk, Orbital, ...)
OTOH, if you're young enough not to know about Wipeout, you probably wouldn't even recognise those groups ^_^
Nah. They paid Trent Reznor, but he bailed after a while. The title song was done by Tweaker, an ex-NIN guy.
And yes, the title track is a blatent rip-off of Lateralus era Tool.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"No game since has ever matched DOOM/DOOM2's music effect upon the player"
This is true. No (well, few, anyway) games have caused me to quit back to the options screen and turn off the music quite so quickly.
Come on; the sound effects might have been pretty good for their time, but that cheesy rock shite in Doom was absolutely hideous.
Wake me when we get to Magical Sound Shower - that's music that really enhances gameplay.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
According to the manual, its Chris Vrenna, who's definitely ex-NIN, but I've never heard him called Tweaker before. That him? (ah, a Google says "Yes")
Personally, I just thought the title track sounded remarkably like Vrenna's usual work, really. Never made the Tool connection, but then they've always sounded similar anyway.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
I recently heard some new and quite popular electronic tracks (hardtrance, hardstyle) that sounded really like they are using the SID.
A single channel with 64-bit precision at 1MHz (excessive) can be sent uncompressed over a standard 10Mbit line or less (and bandwidth for 10 very-high-quality channels could also be send over the same cable), why the big deal about compressing sound data (5.1) just to uncompress it at the amp a few metres away? If it's already compressed that's fine, but the only time where this technology actually makes sense to me is during recording or transmission over a network. Otherwise you're just losing a very small bit of quality (via compression), and gaining nothing at all.
Secondly, all these issues about extra processing can be cleared up by a little more CPU power, or better still, another CPU. All that putting features like Dolby 5.1 encoding on a card do is reduce flexibility, (eg, in this case a requirement to set up your system with 2 rear, 2 front, 1 center and a sub if you want to take advantage of it. It's easy enough to create an algorithm to work with most (eg not all speakers on the left) speaker layouts, so why not let us put them anywhere we like and just tell the software where they are?.)
I for one would like prefer a soundcard that was just, say, 8 DACs, 2 ADCs and 8 raw uncompressed digital outputs over the latest 5.1 card. Except for the additional processing requirements (which aren't negligeable but aren't terrible either) this card would be superior in all aspects (including price) to the latest and greatest from NVidia or whoever, and the drivers would be clean and would virtually write themselves.
I vote for putting less effort into GPU and APU power (although I know this article is about how little effort is being put into APUs) and start giving us decent-priced multi-processor setups.
Anyone share my opinion?
TA's Score also was a full symphonic recording that played off the CD. Stick your TA CD into your CD player one day. It plays, except for track 1.
Hardly anything your soundcard is going to produce.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
IIRC Wipeout came after the Exit Planet Dust album (which would make sense if, as I recall, Chemical Beats was one of the tracks on it) meaning it was the Chemical Brothers and not the Dust Brothers on the soundtrack (name changed to avoid confusion with the other Dust Brothers)
Doom music played through a modern midi synth with sampled sounds is awesome
That reminds me... can anyone recommend a card that actually compares to my old Gravis UltraSound?
That beastie was fantastic! I loved the sampled sounds, and I cried when I could no longer find a decent motherboard with ISA slots so I could plug it in (and there's never been any decent Windows drivers for it).
I haven't found anything that sounds even remotely as good as that old card - I loved it so much I bought two.
For a time, in fact, I had an UltraSound and a Sound Blaster in my PC at the same time - I'd use the UltraSound for all of my MIDI and I'd use the SB for all of the SFX. That was a wonderful combination.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
Just to get my adrenaline pounding, I recently bought the fastest, most hardcore, cutting edge Atari 2600 I could find. The sound effects are mind-blowing...
*beep, beep, boop, beep...*
-- Game Developers: Stop porting badly-textured games from crappy console systems!
Doom would invariably crash within ten seconds of the start of the game if I had the music on. Never found out why... Worked just fine throughout with only sound effects. I'd stalk through a totally silent corridor in the dark...
--- total silence.....
... nothing, nothing...
*eek-creek* GYAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHDAKKADAKKADAKKADAKKADAKKADAKKADA KKADAKKADAKKADAKKADAKKADAKKA... oh... nothing there... [door] WHIRRR... ARRRRGH!
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
There is a company making "Sidstations" from NOS SID chips. They are about $1000 each, and I think they are out of surplus chips, so very limited edition.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I think you can use timidity, which is a software MIDI synthesizer, with a set of instrument samples ('patch files'). Gravis used to put their patch files on their ftp site, I don't know if they're still there.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
The reason you need a shit-hot media processor to encode Dolby 5.1 is that Dolby 5.1 is based on AC3, and needs a shit load of processor power to encode. The "three analog cables" will likely sound better than encoded 5.1, but better still would be a 6-way digital multiplex.
... the AC3 decode is in the amp, so the DVD player just passes the data through.
We must ask ourselves why optical cables cannot transfer 6 x 48,000 x 24 bits per second = 7 mbps. We can transfer 100 mbps over twisted pair! There is no need to encode 5.1 as AC3.
But DVD players are cheaper as a result
The question we need to ask is, why don't those amps have a simple linear non-compressed input mode?
I think you can use timidity, which is a software MIDI synthesizer, with a set of instrument samples ('patch files'). Gravis used to put their patch files on their ftp site, I don't know if they're still there.
Thanks. Yeah, I've been using that (I still have my set of patch files).
What I'd *really* love, though, would be if I could find a way to load them onto one of the newer Sound Blasters or something. I'd like to get away from software if possible.
As an aside, that trick, of course, only works on Windows, because that software is only for Windows.
Maybe some kind soul could come up with a Linux kernel driver that can do MIDI Soft Synth using Gravis patchsets, but pump that output to your *actual* sound card? Now THAT would be awesome! Transparency is really what I'm hoping for.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
Based on real estate prices being through the roof, it seems fewer people can afford enough room to use a decent sound system. As people move into smaller and smaller apartments and have less and less privacy, graphics have gotten improved while sound has gotten neglected.
Yeah, I had a DB50XG too. It was probably the best computer sound purchase I ever made.
The problem though, is that because 99% of everyone else had crap midi, game producers threw out midi in favor of CD-audio.
I think it was one of the final fantasy games that supported XG midi, and installed a soft-synth if you didn't have hardware XG. Other than that XG wasn't really supported in games. Too bad.
I ended up selling the DB50XG with the SB16 for about what I paid for the XG alone. Not too bad, but I still miss it a little bit.
Timidity started off as a Unix program IIRC... it just takes a midi file and some samples and outputs some raw audio. I agree with the principle of getting away from software, but with today's CPUs it makes very little difference (I remember running timidity on a 35MHz ARM chip and it was nearly fast enough for real time playback).
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I'm not sure you understand what I'm suggesting. By implementing it as a driver, it has an opportunity to work with *everything* that uses MIDI, not just the files.
I compose music. That's why I loved the Gravis - it sounded great when I was working on my score. Likewise, games like Doom sounded fantastic too, when the MIDI came out of the UltraSound.
By implementing a driver (Linux AND Windows) that can act as a virtual MIDI device, it would automatically work with *all* of the existing MIDI software out there!
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.