EAX Experts

[Gautama]

Can someone please explain to me, in relative detail, what EAX is and how it will improve my gaming experience. Also, throw in your opinion on whether or not I should upgrade my SB Audigy SE to a X-Fi xtreme music when I purchase my logitech z-5500s.

 

[phide]

EAX is a set of extensions to DirectSound/OpenAL that allow for some, in my opinion, fairly basic effects. In short, with EAX 5.0, you get multi-environment reverberation and occlusion. These are the two basic processing concepts from which some more elaborate processing stems. Reverberation, of course, being time-based delays and reflections, dependent upon predetermined room/environment presets (which can be modified by developers). On the whole, I'm generally pleased with how EAX can handle 'verb. Occlusion is the "muffling" of audio events, the core of which is basic filtering, when there is some sort of obstruction between the point of propagation and the player, but it can also be used in a more generic form to provide distance attenuation (the reduction in sound level as the distance from the audio event increases), and there are also a couple other trickery things that EAX 5.0 can do with it when it's well utilized. I'm not nearly as impressed with the quality of EAX's occlusion processing.

That's what EAX is in a nutshell. Will later versions of EAX improve your gaming experience? Absolutely. The question of whether it will be worth it to you depends on the games you play and how well you like what it does for you.

If you dig nuances, the upgrade might be worth it to you. If you're not that particular about how things should sound, probably not. Either way, the X-Fis are superior to the older models in probably all respects, so it's certainly not a bad upgrade path.