Comment by PaulKeeble | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulKeeble | Hacker News Reader

It is somewhat amusing to me that an object based surround sound system has now become dominate after it was so big on PCs with Soundblaster and the A3D cards and was killed by 5.1 and a change in Windows DirectX to stop object based sound from being possible. Sound has really taken a big innovation step back and still isn't at the stage it was 20 years ago, most games nowadays have to use middleware to give environmental sound effects to play out of the 5.1/7.1/headphones that Windows provides, and then we have the special support for Dolby Atmos which competes poorly with the current good solutions on PC.

With games DTS:X for headphones sounded a lot better than Dolby Atmos for headphones but neither compares well to the latest Soundblaster AE and Sennheiser GSX. Alas binaural and environmental sound is very much a tertiary concern for a lot of gamers so its never recovered from the Windows Vista fatal blow.

Now we have the worst sounding solution developed for home theatrees that solves none of the PC gaming issues and doesn't even really do a good job with Movies either on its way to complete dominance. Its quite disappointing how the sound market has played out after all the work done by AMD for raytraced sound reflections and the early hardware implementations that did a similar thing alongside environmental effects and binaural directional sound including the vertical.

In my opinion, the WWISE 3D audio support is top notch. And you can even license my headphone virtualization as a plugin which - of course I'm biased - sounds awesome!

It's just that nowadays, less and less people play with sound at all. Mobile games? Sound doesn't matter. Switch? Sound matters very little. Xbox/PS5? 99% chance you'll use stereo TV speakers anyway.

So the remaining 0.1% of us who have a surround setup connected to a gaming PC have been optimized out of the market. There just isn't enough ROI for gaming companies to spend resources at pleasing 1 out of 1000 players with 3D sound.

The fact that most bluetooth headsets/buds have too much latency for gaming/video probably contributed a bit to that state of affairs.

At least with video playback you can compensate by delaying the image, with gaming that would drastically hurt the user experience.

Speaking from a developer-manager & developer-experience point of view, using Wwise was awful for us -- it remains one of the worst decisions we made on our debut game release. I'm sure it's great for larger studios/shops or for AAA budget titles, but it was a nightmare for our small team.

Stuff like rare crashes on certain semi-obscure hardware, where the crash dumps clearly indicated issues deep within the Wwise (native code) stack, were extremely difficult (or impossible) to debug. Wwise provides zero support for their base licensing fee, you have to pay for service on top of licensing to get any support at all.

Their Unity "SDK" / user-land code was awful, too, and basically had to be 80% rewritten to be usable at the most moderate level of scale. That's more of a gripe, working with their native side more directly wasn't that bad -- and they've perhaps improved their default C#/user-land code since then.

Another grip is that WWISE devs/designers/engineers are expensive, and making any change requires firing up their application.

Overall, the entire experience was poor, especially since we paid for the privilege. My advice would be that you can't seriously consider WWISE for your project unless you have an audio engineer on staff and intend to keep them on staff for the duration of your project (plus a year or two for support).

TLDR: IMO Wwise may be a solid product, but only for projects with a minimum budget of approximately 7 figures.

Aureal was killed by Creative bringing frivolous lawsuits to drain their cash and then buying out their assets when they went bankrupt.

Yeah, I will forever remain irrationally angry over this. The A3D hardware was great. The HRTF functionality straight up embarrassed Creative's competing products at the time, and the cards were very reasonably priced.

I remember the same day I read the headline about the acquisition on Ars Creative nuked the entire A3D support website.

It's frustrating to me that our system is set up such that a bully company with cash is quite likely to get away with this sort of tactic entirely legally.

The surround sound and HRTF on the PlayStation 5 exceeds my expectations. On the famous tech conference, they talked about calibrating the sound space relative your ears to get the best possible surround feel, but that's yet to come.

From what I heard, that's convolution via FFT, so in effect very long FIR filters. And yes, they should be able to fully customize things for your ears and for the headphones by pre-multiplying in the appropriate equalizer FIR filters into the 3D room impulse response.

I have no idea what you just said, so I upvoted.

How does this work, though? They'd have to parameterize it based on the actual room, right? Does that mean the user has to calibrate things manually?

Perhaps it can be done with the microphone in the controller?

Yes, there are algorithms to estimate the room impulse response from speakers and a microphone.

Sony has ear-specific IR/TF tech on android. You can get their app to take a photo of your ears, get the blob back. Tidal and Deezer in turn can use some 360 sound API to play their surround music through this.

Ah, I miss my Gravis Ultrasound. Good times.

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