3D Audio Standard Released

CIStud writes The Audio Engineering Society (AES) has released its new 3D Audio Standard (AES69-2015), covering topics such as binaural listening, which is growing due to increased usage of smartphones, tablets and other individual entertainment systems that offer audio using headphones. AES states that an understanding of the way that the listener experiences binaural sound, expressed as head-related transfer functions (HRTF) facilitates the way to 3D personal audio. The standard also looks into convolution-based reverberation processors in 3D virtual audio environments, which has also grown with the increase of available computing power.

Comments

And another DRM loop to jump through...

[rodrigoandrade]

Let's not forget that this means new DRM and additional difficulty to get shit that we paid for working together.

Re:And another DRM loop to jump through...

[rodrigoandrade]

Every new digital technology improvement in the A / V / videogame department has brought new DRM with it. I can't see how this time it's going to be different.

Aureal Vortex 2

[J-1000]

Interactive 3D sound was incredible on my sound card with a Vortex 2 chipset back around 1999. After their acquisition by Creative Labs I've heard very little good 3D sound. Is it really that uncommon, or am I just numb? Seems odd that we're still trying to get this figured out.

Re:Aureal Vortex 2

[Dutch Gun]

We're not still trying to figure this out. It's that we *can't* use it.

HRTF is a patent minefield, thanks to Creative Labs and a few others. It's extremely difficult to develop decent software HRTF functions without stepping on someone's patent. No one in the videogame industry bothers with hardware acceleration anymore as it's not supported, and even if it were, is far too limiting (think fixed-pipeline versus shader-based rendering). As such, we're pretty much stuck with basic pan/volume simulation of 3D sound, perhaps with a bit of low-pass filtering if you're lucky.

Fortunately, many of those patents should be expiring soon, and CPUs are now plenty powerful enough to perform those calculations in software. So, we may see high-quality HRTF functions make a comeback in the next five years or so. Kind of sad, really.

Re:Could be promising

[Theaetetus]

> but also because I can get much better sound quality out of headphones for a fraction of the price of comparable speakers.

Doubtful. The distance between your ears and your headphones are far from long enough to experience lower frequencies.

That makes no sense, both from a physics standpoint and a common sense standpoint. For the former, sound is varying air pressure over time. Distance doesn't come into it, and you don't need to run around in a space to hear low frequencies.

For the latter, the distance between ear buds and your eardrum are approximately what, half an inch? Sound travels at about 1000 ft/sec, or conversely, has a wavelength of 1 ft at 1kHz, 1 inch at 12 kHz, and a half-inch at 24kHz. If your ability to hear low frequency depended on the distance between your ear and the source, then no one wearing earbuds could hear anything below 24 kHz, right? And since most people can't hear above 20kHz, then ear buds would just be silence generators, right?

Or, if you wanted to hear the rumble of an approaching train in the distance, you wouldn't put your ear on the track because "the distance between it and your ear wouldn't be enough to hear low frequencies" and instead, you'd want to stand several feet away?

In fact, as noted above, the wavelength of 1 kHz sound wave in air is 1 ft. At 100 Hz, it's 10ft, and at 20 Hz, it's 50 ft. How many people have 50 feet between their ears and their speakers? Or even 10 feet in most living rooms?

Your post makes no sense, no matter how you think about it.