Reddit reviews Duets
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SINATRA FRANKJAZZ BLUESINTERNATIONALMUSIC
We found 1 Reddit comments about Duets. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
I always get a bit depressed when these posts come around again.
This stuff has been available for about 15 years. I used to work for Sensaura. We licensed to audio chip manufacturers. All of the problems mentioned in here (cross-talk cancellation, different shapes of pinnae etc for example) have been solved a long time ago. Our technology was in pretty much every PC soundcard that was not made by Creative. It was also in the original Xbox and nForce motherboards. Our later implementation was completely CPU-based; it was all done in the driver and would work on any AC97 chipset. We also had a software implementation for consoles called GameCODA.
Then we got bought by Creative and those patents have pretty much sat in their cupboard, along with the patents from Aureal. Microsoft is also to blame for the demise of 3D audio as when Vista came out, they changed the audio subsystem so that you couldn't access audio hardware (or a custom driver like ours) through DirectX.
So if you build yourself a time-machine, go back 10 years and buy a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz soundcard, all of your 3D audio dreams will come true. In my mind, it was the best soundcard ever made and included Virtual Ear in the driver, which let you tune the 3D audio to your own ear shape. We also had MacroFX, which simulated sounds very close to the head, ZoomFX, which simulated sounds of any size instead of just a point source, a version that would add full 3D (including vertical positioning) to a surround sound setup, and a whole bunch of other marvellous stuff.
As for everyone going on about cross-talk cancellation as if its a big new thing, here's a PDF of the Sensaura whitepaper on it from 1999. Just search for stuff like Sensaura patents for the rest. There are loads of them, all now owned by Creative.
Edit 1 - fixed links and added whitepaper
Edit 2 - some more Sensaura info:
Sensaura was originally designed for music recordings. The company itself was born out of a research project at EMI's Central Research Laboratories (CRL); the same building where Alan Blumlein invented stereo and the CAT scanner was invented. We had a little museum near reception with the first CAT scanner prototype (built using a common lathe) and such things as King George's gold microphone.
Some of the first uses of Sensaura were on classical CDs and a couple of other albums (Milla Jovovich, Prefab Sprout and Frank Sinatra). These were all intended to be listened to via speakers, so the cross-talk cancellation was built into the recording. Also, classical music aficionados are amongst the most discerning of listeners, so the 3D and cross-talk cancellation was designed to be as transparent as possible. The cross-talk cancellation was especially good as it produced no noticeable phasing effects as you moved left<->right in front of the speakers.
After Aureal started to produce 3D audio for games, it was realised that the 3D music technology (which at that point was built into a rather cool blue multi-channel mixing console with a joystick in the middle of it) could be scaled down for games. A few years later and it really was in pretty much every piece of audio hardware that wasn't made by Creative. If you're interested, read up on Sensaura's Digital Ear. I'll try to find the rest of the Sensaura white papers as they're really interesting.
Edit 3:
Found this Concepts Guide from the web archive of our old GameCODA website which gives a really good overview of all of the Sensaura gaming features. And just think...this was standard on PC games 10 years ago.
Edit 4:
I dug out the white papers I could find and uploaded them (they're really good). The ones that I know are missing are the ones about ZoomFX (volumetric sounds) and Multidrive (3D audio through multiple speakers):
I did find a PDF of a presentation on implementing ZoomFX.
Also, as an example of how common place this all was:
Interactive 3D Audio Rendering Guidelines Level 2.0 by the 3D Working Group of the Interactive Audio Special Interest Group, September 1999.
Edit 5: One last thing for you. I've uploaded CodaPlayer3D. It came with our GameCODA SDK. It just lets you load in a mono sound and move it around in 3D with various other parameters like reverbs and so on. It's got a bug in it that won't let you switch the output mode (or the HRTF mode), so I'm not sure if it's stuck in speaker mode or headphone mode. Also, the effect is much better with reverb switched on, but is also not as good as if you had a Santa Cruz card and had tuned the output to your own ear. Also, one of the big problems with selling 3D audio to people is that it doesn't impress many people without being able to switch between stereo and 3D. I think this is because 3D is our natural way of to hear things and the brain settles into it really easily (like when you watch a 3D film and forget that it's 3D after 5 minutes).