cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Unfortunate regression in 3D audio since the 90's

mihalski
Honored Guest
So we finally have decent and affordable head-mounted displays coming, but what about the audio?

Back in the mid 90's things were much more advanced than they are now in terms of immersive 3D audio:

http://toni.org/a3d/

I still have my Aureal Vortex2 audio card somewhere. I just wish it was still possible to use its capabilities today.

Has anyone heard of any recent progress in 3D audio? Whether it be hardware or software based?

Regards,
Michal
170 REPLIES 170

ebone260
Honored Guest
Ha. I total agree. I was just talking about this the other day. I don't understand it.

kojack
MVP
MVP
Hehe, another brisbane aureal vortex 2 owner. 🙂

Such a great card. Combined with Thief (which used a sound propagating room system, sound traveled through gaps, doorways and windows) it was an awesome positional experience.

Sadly they didn't know the most important rule of surviving the sound card market: don't aim for the top unless you have enough money to continually fight off Creative's lawyers.
Author: Oculus Monitor,  Auto Oculus Touch,  Forum Dark Mode, Phantom Touch Remover,  X-Plane Fixer
Hardware: Threadripper 1950x, MSI Gaming Trio 2080TI, Asrock X399 Taich
Headsets: Wrap 1200VR, DK1, DK2, CV1, Rift-S, GearVR, Go, Quest, Quest 2, Reverb G2

LordJuanlo
Protege
I still have my Diamond MonsterSound MX-300 sound card inside its box. And I still remember the first time I played Half Life with A3D 2.0 and wavetracing... I will never forget that sensation. After Aureal closure, the Sound Blaster Live! was a step backwards regarding sound positioning accuracy.
Comunidad española de RV / Spanish VR Community

sven
Protege
Have a look at reports about "Headphone:X" by Qualcomm. The demo recently given to various journalists has gotten super promising reviews. I'm looking forward to this tech.

jwilkins
Explorer
Considering that you could almost certainly dedicate a single core or GPU to synthesizing 3D audio completely in software and then send it to a simple D/A converter I'm not sure how it could be considered a regression that we don't have dedicated sound cards. It isn't like the algorithms stopped working.
(╯°□°)╯︵┻━┻

cybereality
Grand Champion
I agree that audio doesn't get the love it deserves. Developers could push the bar a lot further even with current stereo headphones (see binaural audio, barber shop on YouTube, etc.). Seems that current audio engines are "good enough" for most consumers.
AMD Ryzen 7 1800X | MSI X370 Titanium | G.Skill 16GB DDR4 3200 | EVGA SuperNOVA 1000 | Corsair Hydro H110i Gigabyte RX Vega 64 x2 | Samsung 960 Evo M.2 500GB | Seagate FireCuda SSHD 2TB | Phanteks ENTHOO EVOLV

jwilkins
Explorer
Good audio design is almost invisible. Heck, even mediocre audio design is mostly invisible. You get about 90% of the benefit from just having sound, any sound at all, play at moments that the player expects.

The classic 8-bit waveforms have an almost Pavlovian effect on people. If you've played an MMO you will know that certain sounds especially trigger your pleasure centers like a line of cocaine.

Modern games now have tens of thousands of sound samples, but how many ordinary people would really properly notice if you cut that down to a couple of hundred? (Excluding NPC voices samples which would become way more repetitive.) I think the benefit is mostly subconscious.

One big problem is that we are reaching a point where sampling real world sounds is just not going to be enough! We need to go further down the line of synthesizing sounds out of whole cloth (weird metaphor I know...)

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,44&q=dinesh+manocha+audio+synthesis
(╯°□°)╯︵┻━┻

mihalski
Honored Guest
"jwilkins" wrote:
Considering that you could almost certainly dedicate a single core or GPU to synthesizing 3D audio completely in software and then send it to a simple D/A converter I'm not sure how it could be considered a regression that we don't have dedicated sound cards. It isn't like the algorithms stopped working.


Could...

Maybe. And we COULD have voxel based 3D graphics running at 600 - 2000 frames per second at 720p on a low-end laptop. But we don't. See http://www.atomontage.com.

If an advanced 3D sound engine comes before this voxel engine then I'll be happy.

I'll have a look into Headphone:X. I'm also reminded that Papa Sangre recently had an audio engine overhaul, so perhaps they'l license that?

P.S. Why yes... It is! Check out http://papaengine.com. It would be nice to have something like this that's open source.

jwilkins
Explorer
When I said we could dedicate a single core or a GPU to sound I didn't mean to generate beeps and boops and it would be a strawman argument to imagine that is what I meant and then argue against it.


Strike that. I guess you meant that people don't write "software" graphics engines nowadays, so why would they write a software audio engine? My argument would be that with GPUs being as generally programmable as they are you really can write a nice graphics engine on a GPU that doesn't use Direct3D or OpenGL except to draw the final image. People don't really do this except for research purposes because, well, D3D and OGL have a huge amount of momentum now.

Audio doesn't have this legacy problem though.
(╯°□°)╯︵┻━┻