A3D vs EAX - The 90s 3D Audio War
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- Опубликовано: 21 апр 2023
- In the late 90s Aureal, Creative and others brought incredible three dimensional sound home to consumer PCs. Using a pair of simple stereo headphones and an appropriate sound card, gamers could immerse themselves in incredible soundscapes in games like Half Life, Unreal, Thief and many many others. Join me on a quest into the unique and magical world of 90s 3D audio.
If you enjoyed this video, you might also like my retro-infused Sci Fi novels available here:
www.amazon.co.uk/Books-Samuel... 
Игры
this video is criminally underrated you absolutely deserve a bigger following!
the amount of editing effort into this video is sooo underrated, amazing video 👍
As coincidence might have it, I got this recommended the same day I got myself an amazing new pair of headphones. I'm already big into Audio so it was a no-brainer clicking on this, and it's actually insane how well made this video it is and how much more attention you deserve for this beautiful work and act of preservation. Even quite educational! I can only vaguely imagine the sheer effort that must've gone into setting everything up in working order and capturing it.
Thanks so much for making this! Surely earned a new sub, hopefully of many to come!
Thank you so much for your kind words and I hope you enjoyed the video. What headphones did you get?
@@retromuel You're welcome!!
I got the Hifiman Sundara. First time using Planar Magnetic drivers at quite a reasonable price. Neither me nor my girlfriend with a decade-long history in dynamic headphones have ever had something this good on our ears. It actually very much elevated my experience on this video as well!
@@AuralAlliance Very nice. Sounds hardcore. I have a decent pair of AKGs I found on sale about ten years ago. I'm not a big basshead or anything but I've always found them a bit underwhelming in that department unfortunately. Maybe I'll invest in some of those one of these days!
Will never forgive Creative for what they did to A3D, still EAX from 2.0 on sounds amazing too.
It was very interesting to learn about these things and especially to hear them. Thanks for the video! I played most of these games on PC back in the days, but unfortunately didn't have good sound card or headphones.
Hi. Hope you enjoyed it. Yeah I didn't know about all the 3D audio stuff back in the day either. I just had a generic soundcard alongside my 3DFX Voodoo 1 graphics card. It was the good folks at the Vogons forum who turned me onto it just a couple of years ago and I decided to investigate. It really does add a new dimension to these old but still awesome games. Take care and thanks for watching.
-There is positional 3D audio in a game called POD by Ubisoft (bundled on MMX PCs in January 1997). It didn’t require an Aureal A3D sound card for its HRTF and elevation filtering. See the November 1996 issue of Next Generation Magazine for proof (can be found as a PDF-scan online).- -There existed binaural 3D audio/elevation filtering and doppler in a Windows 95 game called A-Train 5 (released alongside Pentium MMX in January 1997). Japan only. Doesn’t require a 3D sound card (I’ve used AWE32 with it), pre-dates the earliest A3D card (Diamond Monster Sound) by several months. I have footage of the game.-
[EDIT: I have crossed over a bunch of my previous misinformation thanks to the commenter ZanQuance who made me question my initial thoughts on a game called A-Train 5. A-Train 5 doesn’t use positional audio, but instead uses clever volume fading between high- and low-frequency sound loops to fake 3D sound.] [EDIT 2: … and also, I should not assume POD uses real HRTF/positional audio without proper analysis.]
You peaked my curiosity so I took a look into A-Train 5 and played around with it a bit. The sounds are all prerecorded with those filter effects and are not processed on the fly like A3D, EAX (CMSS3D) and Sensaura do. The tools to do prerecorded HRTF effects existed in studios long before we got them into our soundcards for real time processing.
@@ZanQuance -“Prerecorded”? Explain how. I can clearly hear a difference when a vehicle passes above vs. below the camera in A5. It changes in real-time as the perspective moves around. You can hear this below-filtration in my truck footage from the game.-
-(P.S. Another pre-A3D game with positional 3D audio is POD by Ubisoft)-
@dipshidian All I hear is stereo left/right panning of the audio samples with volume attenuation. If there exists HRTF effects being applied real time in the game I am not hearing them even in your videos.
POD makes use of the original Dolby Surround, which is channel panning filters. In this case its panning across 4 channels mixing the rear into the front.
[edit] Allow me to retract what I initially said here before, after looking through your videos I see you have some examples of HRTF. Therefore you should be well aware of the different HRTF DS3D provides and A3D, other formats like Dolby Surround which are panning filters only do not apply any HRTF therefore even if they do predate Aureal's A3D 1.0 they are not the same.
Your Thief video is interesting, as you are comparing A3D 1.0 which always lacked reverb against DS3D+EAX on the Live! which of course is going to have much better reverb than A3D 1.0, since it's non-existent on A3D 1.0.
I have also verified that A-train 5 does not use DS3D and uses basic DirectSound2D. Which leaves only two options, your ears are either tricking you and you are confusing panning and volume attenuation for HRTF effects (not likely since you have clear examples of HRTF in action), or the game is using some custom written audio API that applies HRTF which I am not hearing, nor am I seeing any indication of in the disassembly of the main executable.
@@ZanQuance -Really? You didn’t hear the elevation filtering in action when the truck passes under the camera at --3:30-- in my A-Train 5 truck video? I guess I have to put together a proper A5 video covering its 3D [audio] in greater detail.-
I know it seems unfair of me to compare A3D 1.0 against DS3D + EAX 1.0 in Thief, but I think the spotty positioning in DS3D means that the playing field is levelled out when compared to A3D 1.0’s lack of reverb but very accurate positioning.
@@ZanQuance I have now uploaded over 9 minutes of footage -demonstrating positional audio with elevation filtering in A-Train 5.-
If only the next Quake, would feature audio on par with what Aureal was doing...
ruclips.net/video/leeU3ULOWII/видео.html
A3D was doing things mathematically, but in practice, this resulted in a tinny sound, as if it were played through mediocre speakers. EAX took a different approach - they had a few presets with several parameters to tweak for environments and used high-quality reverberation. Creative/EMU reverbs were designed by Jean-Marc Jot and were of professional recording studio grade. The way EAX simulated 3d is more similar to how contemporary film soundtracks are mixed. So, generally speaking, EAX resulted in, if less realistic and faithful, a higher quality and more impressive sound. In fact, in this video, you can hear that A3D simulation is impressive, positioning-wise, but has a bathroom-like acoustic quality.
The same analogy applies to Lightmaps and prebaked shadows in games, sure they look nice and are of rather high quality, but it lacks the dynamics of real lighting when things in the scene change. A3D went the dynamic route, and EAX went the prebaked route. EAX can sound nice when done right and the parameters are all set correctly. It all boils down to the amount of effort the game designers are willing to put into the audio side of things and A3D is no exception! There are quite a few parameters and tags that must be set for audio assets to sound right, but once the grunt work is done both EAX and A3D will do their thing and we leave it up to the end user to make the final judgement call as to which sound API they prefer.
As for your "tinny sound" comment, I am not certain what that is based off of, I can attest though my own A3D setup that it has quite a lot of bass and boom to it, I hardly ever encounter anything tinny unless the game has very low bitrate sounds. Perhaps you are used to low pass filters on other sound cards? Creative cards forced used them for all audio channels in the Audigy series and up. The Aureal Vortex cards are a bit complicated and do not typically employ their low pass filters on audio samples unless they are being used for A3D effects like atmospheric dampening and wavetracing.
Who is the Chinese Bluetooth lady?
32:52 - likes of openal and what?
Etc etc
I don't like that i must to turn my head the right way to clearly listen to voice.
I don't think I understand sorry.