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Emulated Surround Sound

T

Trauts

n00b
Joined
Jan 2, 2006
Messages
43
Hello. I now that the general consensus here is that true 5.1 surround sound headphones absolutely suck.

Then people recommend that you get standard stereo headphones... but how do you "emulate" the surround sound?

I've heard the "holophonic" mp3s where you get the feeling of true surround sound through headphones, but how can I get it to sound 3D in, say, a game?

Do I need a new sound card for it (I've got the one built into my nForce 3 motherboard), or is it possible to simply have a pass-through driver that converts the game's 5.1 or 7.1 sound audio into two channels, then sends it to the sound card?

Thank you!
 
For games the best 3D sound with headphones comes from the X-Fi...no question about it.
I don't know any other soundcard that has a 3D-effect that is that good.

Terra...
 
Terra said:
For games the best 3D sound with headphones comes from the X-Fi...no question about it.
I don't know any other soundcard that has a 3D-effect that is that good.

Terra...
Click to expand...

How exactly does the sound card make it better? What I mean is... will using a X-Fi give more of a "positional feel," as in being able to pinpoint where someone is? Or is that more a component of what game you're running?

Mister X said:
"They" emulate "it" in a number of different ways
Here is a small collection of articles to get you started--------->
http://headwize.com/tech/index.htm
Click to expand...

I think that's WAY over my head >_< those are technical papers, and all I could find browsing that was hardware emulation.

I DID find these programs earlier:

http://spatializer-estore.stores.yahoo.net/virsurproc11.html
http://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/amm/techinf/ensonido/application.html

I downloaded and tested the first one, but couldn't really notice much of a change. Is this because my sound card is sub-par? I have the one built into the nVidia nForce 3 motherboard series.

The second link only had mp3-player downloads.

There's also this page: http://www.am3d.com/ , but it seems like it needs to be coded for specific games.
 
Trauts said:
How exactly does the sound card make it better? What I mean is... will using a X-Fi give more of a "positional feel," as in being able to pinpoint where someone is? Or is that more a component of what game you're running?
Click to expand...

Yup, the X-Fi har new features...improved 3D on headphnes is one of them.

Terra...
 
The brain determines position of a sound by delay between your left and right ear and by the apparent delay is changing (note there is other factors but they are minute compared to delay preception). You only have 2 ears so why would you need more than 2 sources to simulate positional audio. With headphones this is very easy to accomplish because you know exactly the position of the source and the listener (the cans are on your ears). With standard speakers you do not have the assumption and therefor it does not work very well and having multi speakers works better.
 
m1abram said:
The brain determines position of a sound by delay between your left and right ear and by the apparent delay is changing (note there is other factors but they are minute compared to delay preception). You only have 2 ears so why would you need more than 2 sources to simulate positional audio. With headphones this is very easy to accomplish because you know exactly the position of the source and the listener (the cans are on your ears). With standard speakers you do not have the assumption and therefor it does not work very well and having multi speakers works better.
Click to expand...

Also...there is more than just timing delays, there is also occlusion from the ear lobes from different directions that makes a huge effect. (Tape your ear lobes back and listen to sounds coming from different directions if you don't believe me).

I am pretty sure the algorithym CL uses takes into account for the averaged ear lobe/ear canal shape as well as timing queues.

But...be warned: The X-Fi 3d headphone mode sucks when used with intra aureal canal headphones or ear pod type headphones. The best effect is with standard padded full size headphones.

I would really like if CL made some kind of alignment utility to customize the way it works for each user, since it is inevitable that there will be someone with ears that do not share the average persons ear properties...and the effect will not be as impressive with some of those people unless it could be modified.
 
BBA - did you not notice my () about other factors? ;) Timing delay though is by far much more important.
 
Yeah, it is all in time delays, reverb, that kinda stuff.

It can be done really well, or really badly. My receiver can take a 2 channel source and turn it into 7.1 very well (HK DPR1001) while I have seen others that really suck at it. I have never tried on headphones as I absolutely detest wearing them unless I have to (like on a plane or something).
 
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