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3DsoundSurge Special Feature
Aureal vs Qsound - The Great
Debate
Qsound:
Scott Willing
Aureal: Toni
Shneider
Date Started: June
22, 1998 Date Ended: July 8, 1998
Toni From Aureal Explains What A3D
Is Really About
My answer to Scott's latest musings:
"I'd like to answer Scott's points with something up front: we are getting a bit
esoteric here. What matters is the listening experience for the user. If
it sounds great and enhances game play, that's all that counts. Few
people care about arcane technology details. Now when it comes to
sounding great, we have a pretty solid track record of hitting the spot with a
great 3D audio listening experience. To be more direct: A3D's quality rocks!
The current avalanche of A3D sound cards and titles proves that tons of gamers and tons of
developers took a listen and loved what they heard. Now, I'll try to say
this without insulting anyone, but before A3D came along, Qsound,
DirectSound3D and others had been available for many years and never caught on the
way A3D has. We got to be doing something right!
Just look at the site that this message is on: it is one of several really cool,
thriving, grass roots 3D audio Web sites that have popped up for the simple joy of
celebrating and sharing info about 3D audio. I don't think I'm overstating my case
by saying that these sites are mostly here because of A3D and the way it's
stimulated 3D audio products and games over the last 12 months. None of this
existed before A3D.
My point: let's not get lost in boring details. With A3D, Aureal has proven
that we can build a great 3D audio product. We did it by finding ways to bring
our HRTF 3D audio technology from our high-end, $10,000 sound server products used
in NASA research labs to affordable, mainstream sound cards. Now, we're
building an even better product with A3D 2.0. It is based on wave tracing, the
next wave of technology which has also been running in those high-end server
products and research labs and will soon be available on a store shelf near you.
What else can I say? We have success, a great track record and 10 years
of psycho-acoustic research behind us. A3D 2.0 users are in for a treat!
Before I hit the road for a while (won't be able to post...), I do feel compelled to
say just a few things in direct response to Scott's previous note (this is probably
only interesting to developers):
You say that "Aureal discourages ISVs from supporting competing
hardware... to create the impression of a de facto standard": I don't get
it. What/who are you talking about? Obviously, we encourage people to
use A3D. If they want to support other technologies, of course they can. We don't
discourage anyone. We don't have to, DirectSound3D has enough problems to
discourage most developers. And secondly, we are the de facto standard.
I can walk into any electronics store and chose from several A3D sound cards and
then get any of a few dozen of the hottest new games and they'll fully support my
new sound card with great 3D audio. That's about as standard as it gets at
this point.
Your analysis of wave tracing: We heard the same kinds of comments when A3D came out
last year: "you're crazy to put true HRTF audio rendering on a sound
card" "It'll take too much processing" "It'll be too expensive"
"It's awesome, but it's overkill, people can't hear that well anyway"
"3D stereo spreading is good enough". Today, you are taking
these same sentences and replacing "HRTF" with "wave tracing", and
"3D stereo spreading" with "reverb". Wave tracing is
pushing the envelope. It is new, cutting edge technology, not
re-packaged stuff that was laying around on a shelf somewhere. We like to push
the envelope, set the new standards. We did it last time around, we'll do it
again this fall...
All right, before I get too cocky: you provided a good analysis of what can be
done for environmental acoustics with different levels of processing. You
glossed over the most important one though: occlusions. A sound goes behind a wall.
Very basic case. Reverb, or EAX can't handle it. Wave tracing
can, beautifully, simply, automatically, with muffling and absorption and
everything. That's huge.
Universal hardware support: Our A3D 2.0 API will run on anybody's system using our
host emulation engine. The new API does have many new features and requires
A3D 2.0 hardware to get full rendering support for all those features, but it'll run
on anything, as best as it can. A3D 2.0 is a single-stop, super-set, next-generation
positional audio API that embraces all platforms.
Writing sound code for people: you imply that we run around and write sound code for
everyone. We try! It's called developer support. Of course we can
only do so much, so for the vast majority of titles we just answer support questions
and they handle the coding. Though I will pass your compliment to the person
who has been single-handedly doing the support for the last year. I guess he's
made quite an impression if you think that he's been writing the sound code for over
a hundred A3D titles!
Scott, you didn't answer my question from the last post: can you give us a list of
titles that support DS3D?
Toni Schneider."
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