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November 13, 2011
Is it possible to get "true" 5.1 surround sound from a PC game?
I'm working with an older mobo, P35C-DS3R and using optical to AVR for 5.1 decoding in Dolby, DTS, etc. The ALC889A chip can carry through pre-encoded signals just fine, but PC games are bothersome. What is the reality these days for the 'source audio' of PC releases? I recall often seeing highly compressed MP3, OGG..
I also see these chipsets like X-Fi and CMI8770 on Newegg for sound cards with "Dolby Digital Live" (DDL) - some on-the-fly encoding into a compressed DD stream that can be carried by optical (2.0 PCM). Sounds interesting and I'm seeing a lot of great reviews on it, but remain skeptical.
Is this just a 5.1 virtual matrix of a 2.0 source? Some sort of play with psychoacoustics, as best as I can describe? Or if I see the DD logo on the back of a PC box, should I expect the same positional audio I experience playing the PS3 equivalent? Recent titles like Skyrim come to mind...
I understand that many games use something like OpenAL, I think? Something that can utilize multichannels and send them as discrete signals, but that would be analog stereo plugs. Is "DDL" considered a method to 'combine' these otherwise discrete channels and compress them live to feed to the AVR?
Also, is EAX 5.0 really that important? I'm liking the OMEGA Striker models, ~$76 but Creative shares similar features with EAX 5.0 included -- worth it?
Thanks for any advice.
TLDR - Is "Dolby Digital Live" the PC hardware equivalent of what PS3/360 uses to deliver positional/theatrical in-game audio?
Source audio is usually a mono source, sometimes compressed and sometimes uncompressed, which is blended between channels based on a positional algorithm. EAX is just a standardized toolkit which includes libraries of the maths required to do this sort of positional calculation, in addition to things like reverb, muting, other waveform transformations. The problem you are having has nothing to do with the source: it arises because your onboard chipset is sharing resources with your CPU, which can be subject to delays and stutters when dealing with something like PC-gaming.
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