Sound issue since going to HDMI audio

Galvin

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Jan 22, 2002
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When playing world of warcraft thru HDMI audio. Using an nvidia video card. Some sounds don't have as much detail. When I listen to these same sounds thru DTS connect on Sound Blaster SBX. I can hear more of the sound effect

What this means is during boss fights, everything is much more clear, sounds have more details. This is when I'm using DTS connect on the sound card. Using optical cable connection to the receiver

But when using HDMI audio, the same sounds have less detail, boss fights, boss dialog is not as clear or lower.

I have no idea how to isolate the issue

Using a Denon 591 receiver for both the DTS with optical cable, and HDMI audio with an HDMI cable.
After flipping between the two for an hour. It just came down to sounds losing detail when doing HDMI
 
DTS may be putting additional dynamic range compression on the signal,particularly if you don't have one of the speakers. As to how to test for it... man I dunno there is no easy way without some additional equipment.
 
Well in the creative control panel you can deselect the center speaker. And it becomes a virtual speaker
 

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Yeah without a center speaker setting correct, it's going to sound very funky :D
 
It can be helpful to remember that it's very hard to recognize "fidelity" in gaming audio.

We know what musical instruments and the human voice sound like in various environments, but we don't have a good idea of what space aliens, plasma guns and magic spells are supposed to sound like.

It's much more subjective with the additional element of positional audio being used for a competitive advantage.
 
Ok so I figured out how to record in 5.1 audio. So next time I do some raids, I can record 5.1. Then I can test the audio thru the playback

Thanks
 
Actually may have it figured out. I had gain set to 6db before and had it set to zero now.
 
Well figured out the issue. When I switched everything to qaudrophonic. Combat sounds in world of warcraft sounded better. Could hear more sounds. So my guess is with the creative drivers when you disabled the center speaker. It must of switched to quadrophonic.
 
Well figured out the issue. When I switched everything to qaudrophonic. Combat sounds in world of warcraft sounded better. Could hear more sounds. So my guess is with the creative drivers when you disabled the center speaker. It must of switched to quadrophonic.

Could be something like that, could also be that it says "Oh there's no center speaker so if they play sound from it and the left and right it could get too loud so I'd better apply an excessive amount of dynamic range compression to compensate!" or some shit. Sadly there's a lot of fucky stuff that can go on with surround sound and it is often opaque to users, you don't even know that the equipment is doing it it just does it.

That's actually the biggest reason I have a center on my computer system is I don't want things getting stupid because it doesn't. If I could trust things to properly mix things for a 6.1 setup, I'd do that and not have a center looming over my monitor. However I can't, so I have a full 7.1 setup and the center is there.

Glad you found something that works well for your setup. In the end all that REALLY matters is that you are happy with how things sound :)
 
I only have a center speaker for movies. The speaker covers part of my screen at the bottom. But never bothers me for watching movies. Otherwise its 4.1. I don't even have a real sub.
These are cambridge soundworks ensemble IV speakers. Yeah they're old, but they still sound good
 
Some people run a "ghost" center where the center info is just sent to the L/R channels.

That worked for me on my old Marantz NR1501 receiver, but I could never get it to work on my Integra DTR 40.2

It became an issue last year when I was playing Titan Fall 2 - the dialog wanted to play on the center channel and center channel ONLY.

I actually rigged up a Beats Pill to play from the center pre-out for a few days because I didn't have an extra speaker and I needed to hear the dialog.

Then I broke down and got a 3rd Q100 for the center and put them all on stands.

It doesn't get used very often, but it's one of those things that - at least in my config - when I need it, I really need it.
 
Some people run a "ghost" center where the center info is just sent to the L/R channels.

That worked for me on my old Marantz NR1501 receiver, but I could never get it to work on my Integra DTR 40.2

It became an issue last year when I was playing Titan Fall 2 - the dialog wanted to play on the center channel and center channel ONLY.

I actually rigged up a Beats Pill to play from the center pre-out for a few days because I didn't have an extra speaker and I needed to hear the dialog.

Then I broke down and got a 3rd Q100 for the center and put them all on stands.

It doesn't get used very often, but it's one of those things that - at least in my config - when I need it, I really need it.

I tried making a ghost speaker by sending the center channel to the left and right with equalizer APO. It worked fine. But for some reason world of warcraft just doesn't come in as clear in combat etc with 4.1 emulated on 5.1. So quadrophonic seems best
 
I only have a center speaker for movies. The speaker covers part of my screen at the bottom. But never bothers me for watching movies. Otherwise its 4.1. I don't even have a real sub.
These are cambridge soundworks ensemble IV speakers. Yeah they're old, but they still sound good

I ran quadrophonic for years on my PC, actually just had two front speakers, two rear speakers, no sub. Worked great. However when I switched from using pro gear (meaning a multi-channel pro card to a mixer to amps to speakers) to consumer gear (meaning HDMI to a receiver to speakers) there was some crap relating to the center and so I got one.
 
There's that, and if you disable the center channel on the receiver, it might do the mixing on that end as well. Really depends on the receiver in question.
 
There's that, and if you disable the center channel on the receiver, it might do the mixing on that end as well. Really depends on the receiver in question.

And they don't document it well :p. They don't tend to say what they do, how they do it, and what else they do. It is annoying. Like Denon receivers if you send them a channel configuration with more speakers than what you have hooked up no problem, they mix down the channels to the nearest ones, using equal power law and any Dolby/DTS info present... but they also turn on a dynamic range control they don't tell you about in the manual and there's no control for it.
 
There's that, and if you disable the center channel on the receiver, it might do the mixing on that end as well. Really depends on the receiver in question.

Yeah can't do that cause I want to watch movies. And it would be a pain to go in the options and change it everytime.

Just wish why world of warcraft sounds better with quadrophonic vs 5.1. I actually hear less sound effects as clearly with 5.1, its weird
 
That is wierd, but sounds like it's an artifact from Blizzard's sound implementation. Generally the center channel in movies is for the audio source of focus, usually whoever is speaking. Not sure how they translate that to games; I didn't fiddle with 5.1 sound very long.
 
I am using a denon receiver 591, so that may be the reason for the sound issues between 5.1 and 4.1 for games
 
Well figured out the issue. When I switched everything to qaudrophonic. Combat sounds in world of warcraft sounded better. Could hear more sounds. So my guess is with the creative drivers when you disabled the center speaker. It must of switched to quadrophonic.

I was messing around yesterday and set my speakers to Quadraphonic (instead of 7.1)

It worked on Apex Legends, but when I fired up BlackOps4, I had no sound. Switched to the headphone amp - works fine - back to speakers - nothing.

Then I changed the speaker config back to 7.1 and it worked again.

I wonder if that's the game or some issue with HDMI...
 
Hard to say, you'd have to test it by seeing if quadrophonc works in Windows and other apps but not that game.

In theory, it should work with everything. All games should support any mode Windows does. I mean they are all object based audio so they should be able to render down to any speaker config. Likewise receivers should be able to support any combo of speakers for input. However "should" and "does" are two different things as we know. Either the game or your receiver could be dumb and don't like a quadrophonic configuration.
 
Hard to say, you'd have to test it by seeing if quadrophonc works in Windows and other apps but not that game.

In theory, it should work with everything. All games should support any mode Windows does. I mean they are all object based audio so they should be able to render down to any speaker config. Likewise receivers should be able to support any combo of speakers for input. However "should" and "does" are two different things as we know. Either the game or your receiver could be dumb and don't like a quadrophonic configuration.

Yeah, that was my assumption as well.
 
If possible, always send full 5.1/7.1 to the receiver, let that decide how to handle where the centre channel data goes.
ie disable the centre channel on the AV system, not the PC.

I'm using ribbon tweeter floor standing speakers which let me disable the centre without missing a trick.
Centre audio is fed to both front speakers by my Denon AVR, the central image is created in the centre of my TV, perfect.
No need to place a bulky centre in the wrong place.
My Brother does the same with his ribbon tweeter speakers and ones I built for my Mum let her do it too.

I used the technique of feeding all channels and letting the AV system handle removal of the centre speaker, on the following AV equipment:
Onkyo 7.1 amp
Emotiva 7.1 Pre-amp
Oppo 105 and 205 as pre-amps
Denon X4400H 11.2 amp

We havent needed a centre speaker for 8 years ish and havent missed it once.
 
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Games' support of speaker modes is dependent on support from the game's audio middleware or API (Wwise, FMOD, Miles, CriWare, XAudio2, DirectSound, OpenAL, etc.) and the programmers' skill or attention to detail.

I ran into some games not outputting surround sound because they didn't support "home theater" modes such as 7.1 or 5.1 side-surround; the games would fall back to stereo output unless I set Windows to 5.1 rear-surround. These games used Miles Sound System as their middleware and for whatever reason Miles just wasn't programmed to recognize those speaker configurations because it appears that, when Miles queried Windows for the speaker mode, Miles was looking for a specific string such as 'speakermode_5point1_rear'. It appears that many games will get a speaker count from Windows and then output =< whatever the game supports regardless of the mode, this just goes back to how thorough a programmer is in ensuring their logic is thorough enough to detect either the exact speaker mode or the next best mode and then tell the game to output based on that. Games went through a period where you could specify the speaker mode in the options, then a period where that was all auto-detected and set based on what was detected, and now it seems like more games are giving the player the ability to select their desired speaker mode.

I set my X-Fi to 5.1 and unchecked the center speaker in the Windows speaker config and Shadow Warrior 2 saw the card as being set to 5.1, when setting the card to quadraphonic, SW2 shows 4.0/4.1 in the audio options; I didn't notice any game audio missing in 5.1 minus-center mode so I think the Creative driver mixes anything directed to the center out to the front L+R. I set my HDMI AVR to 5.1 in the Windows config and unchecked the center channel; when testing the center while disabled, Windows pushes the audio to the front L+R. Regardless, if you have 5.1 speakers, I'd set and enable all the speakers in Windows or the sound card software and forget it until a game breaks because it's too dumb to support that configuration.
 
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