Sound General

I saw Ron Watkins at a grocery store in Manila yesterday. I told him how cool it was to meet him in person, but I didn’t want to be a douche and bother him and ask him for photos or anything.

He said, “Oh, like you’re doing now?”

I was taken aback, and all I could say was “Huh?” but he kept cutting me off and going “huh? huh? huh?” and closing his hand shut in front of my face. I walked away and continued with my shopping, and I heard him chuckle as I walked off. When I came to pay for my stuff up front I saw him trying to walk out the doors with like fifteen Milky Ways in his hands without paying.

The girl at the counter was very nice about it and professional, and was like “Sir, you need to pay for those first.” At first he kept pretending to be tired and not hear her, but eventually turned back around and brought them to the counter.

When she took one of the bars and started scanning it multiple times, he stopped her and told her to scan them each individually “to prevent any side effracts,” and then turned around and winked at me. I don’t even think that’s a word. After she scanned each bar and put them in a bag and started to say the price, he kept interrupting her by yawning really loudly.

There should be no additional playback distortion however. Otherwise it fucks with sound in unintended ways.

Most modern music however is shit and it's mixed and mastered like shit, so it's just Garbage In, Garbage Out. Better just save time by not listening it.

use any cheap fucking USB DAC, play audio with sample rate that matches DAC (use proper software resampler with linear phase if conversion is needed), invest in good amplifier&speakers. And fetch your music in original quality, not some fucking random mp3s from G-d knows where.

Pro sound cards are a meme, they matter very little if you get past the point of real poop quality.

you are stupid

This was just to circumvent the MB's native sound drivers which were realtek. I also circumvented my network adapter from realtek by getting a network card from intel that worked wonders.

Believe it or not the soundcard I got sounds way better and can get a lot louder that the native realtek. All I did was sandwich tinfoil between two pieces of cardboard and taped it to the side of the circuit board with all the components. It drastically cut the idle interference noise out and I only hear a buzzing/ringing when scrolling white pages on my browser or when playing a game that has bright menus.

pic related I car hear the ellipsis as they animate in the bottom right and if I scroll this thread with the *tsuba theme I'll hear a faint buzz.

That's why you should use external screened soundcard, faggot

Why do audiophiles always know nothing about computers, nothing about signal processing, and often don't even know Nyquist/Shannon sampling theorem?

I can't even comprehend the amount of retardation in this thread.

100% electrical isolation

Most people think being an audiophile means "buying the most expensive audio equipment, it just werks"

This. Better than USB or internal cards.

That's because it is.

You need to get pretty good headphones/speakers in order for anything else in your system to limit quality, barring very severe malfunctions or electrical/radio pollution. The key thing is to remember that PCs are capable of fully exploiting normal audio equipment (decoders, eDACs, amps, unpowered speakers/headphones, etc.) and that the most expensive parts of a good set-up are analog equipment that will never have to be upgraded for decades.

The primary purpose of audio cards was once coprocessing through elaborate APIs. Sadly, that's all gone down the toilet, and new games do everything in software. While there's a lot of spare cores worth of CPU/GPGPU power floating around to do good sound in theory, most game authors have pretty basic implementations, and off-the-shelf middleware isn't very sophisticated either.

Nobody will ever even reach the level Aureal was at in the early 2000s with wavetracing, let alone advance beyond it. Fuck Creative Labs.

Pure autism.

Your waifu is gay OP

...

What, is your god Voldemort? Opinion discarded.

I just want to say, I have godly hearing.
I can hear frequencies below 1Hz and above 100 kHz.
I have to fill my auditory canals with special gas to get the best sound quality.
I generate my own electricity, because the plebeian grid power has too much ripple.
The steps in 32bit digital sampling are just soooo jarring. I get my music mastered onto custom tungsten discs, which are read by laser beams in a vacuum.

Tell me more about this company Aureal, user. It has piqued my interest. What made their audio devices so special?

A really expensive Apogee is the best DAC

You retarded, double nigger. They're both digital

This, what one should care about is getting a good DAC and good sound boxes. I'm sure everyone's PC is capable of digital audio by now, and if it is there you got completely fucking electrical isolation where possible

The way how 3D sound was done in most games was typified by Creative Labs' EAX running atop Microsoft's DirectSound 3D. This worked by applying simple filters (reverb, flange, tremo, etc.) to the entire game's audio based on the listener's location, or in later versions of EAX, to individual sounds based on their locations, and even later versions of EAX allowing multiple filters to be used, smooth transitions between filters, simple line-of-sight for sounds occluded by solid objects, etc.. Modern games don't generally use APIs to handle sound in a standardized way anymore, but the 3rd-party drop-in middleware most game devs now license (FMOD, XACT, Wwise, MilesSS, etc.) are used to achieve similar functionality, though more often approximating earlier rather than later versions of EAX.

This approach is roughly equivalent to the state of game graphics from about the totally static era of Doom, up to perhaps the start of dynamic lights and simple entity shadows augmented by prebaked environmental light/shadows. In other words, most game audio today isn't even as technically sophisticated as today's graphical techniques of full global illumination and shaders. Here's a more detailed overview:
ixbtlabs.com/articles2/sound-technology/

Aureal, on the other hand, used something similar to realtime raytracing (though much lower resolution) to calculate the direct and indirect propagation of sound waves through 3D environments using actual in-game geometry (though sometimes simpler invisible geometry was used, much like with collision detection). This was further aided by coding different objects and fluid/gas volumes with different material properties based on their aural reflectivity/refractivity/insularity to approximate realistic behavior. For a more detailed overview, read the A3D 2.0 & 3.0 spec PDFs I attached.

Sadly, Aureal was murdered by Creative, and after years of monopolistic legal/financial activity against all competitors in an effort to sell hardware, Creative itself basically vanished with the switch to software audio, and with it all attempts at standardizing or advancing 3D game audio.

Perhaps the final hope for game audio getting better lies in, of all places, VR meme. Due to how manifestly shit modern game audio is compared to visuals in VR, graphics companies like nVidia (VRWorks Audio) and AMD (TrueAudio Next) are now pushing devs to standardize on vaguely modern technologies for 3D sound.

One further benefit of VR (or at least VR-like) gaming for 3D audio is that simply by using a head tracker (even something like TrackIR) with even the cheapest headphones or earbuds (preferably canalphones), the small involuntary head movements critical to the human brain's ability to accurately locate sounds could be exploited, especially when combined with personalized HRTF FIRs of the listener's ears, head, and shoulders.

Very interesting. Almost like what Audyssey as a company does in single-instances to configure positional audio for surround-sound effects, though obviously an amp's output is only going to be as precise as its input.

After your first comment I read up on the tragic fate of Aureal and their relationship with Creative - how they gave them a final "Fuck you" before being consumed in the end. Reads very much like the tragic hero archetype. Fuck Creative Labs. I have not bought a product of theirs in many years, and will never start.

I agree that VR sound will be interesting - I have been exposed to some of its unique advantages via Martin O Donnell (Composer/sound designer for Halo series inb4 Holla Forums get out) who is actually an objectively intelligent audio engineer and has had similar insights to the ones you bring up, and is working on realizing them to their fullest extent.

Very interesting times.
Once a VR exclusive title's soundtrack is released in both .MP3 and ".VRFLAC" or whatever format for listening exclusively within a VR headset, I think we will see a revolution in musical releases/videos as well, especially in the Classical genre which is seeing revival in - of all places - video games.

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I heard a rustling crackling sound in my headphone earpiece and I took them off and saw an earwig poking out.

Not really. That only happened when sound cards hit a "good enough" wall and had to find ways to justify you continuing to buy new ones and yes I know about things like SID but a microprocessor isn't that kind of API, and GUS was a totally different evolutionary branch. They've continued to get worse since then. Soundblaster cards used to be so simple to use that my "driver" was about 100 lines of assembly and there was very little electrical interference. The only improvement since then that (some) people actually use is surround but that's just implemented the same way stereo was, yet the hardware is a nightmare of complexity, full of bugs, and has horrible interference issues.

I would just like sound to fucking work period on my laptop. Especially audio input; which completely doesn't work at all.

System: Host: fringe-Alienware-17-R2 Kernel: 4.4.0-21-generic x86_64 (64 bit gcc: 5.3.1) Desktop: Cinnamon 3.0.7 (Gtk 3.18.9-1ubuntu3.1) dm: mdm Distro: Linux Mint 18 SarahMachine: System: Alienware product: Alienware 17 R2 v: A04 Chassis: type: 8 v: A04 Mobo: Alienware model: Alienware 17 R2 v: X04 Bios: Alienware v: A04 date: 04/14/2015CPU: Quad core Intel Core i7-4720HQ (-HT-MCP-) cache: 6144 KB flags: (lm nx sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3 vmx) bmips: 20787 clock speeds: min/max: 800/3600 MHz 1: 2693 MHz 2: 2613 MHz 3: 2710 MHz 4: 2630 MHz 5: 2768 MHz 6: 2591 MHz 7: 2639 MHz 8: 2604 MHzGraphics: Card-1: Intel 4th Gen Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller bus-ID: 00:02.0 chip-ID: 8086:0416 Card-2: NVIDIA GM204M [GeForce GTX 980M] bus-ID: 01:00.0 chip-ID: 10de:13d7 Display Server: X.Org 1.18.3 driver: nvidia Resolution: [email protected]/* */ GLX Renderer: GeForce GTX 980M/PCIe/SSE2 GLX Version: 4.5.0 NVIDIA 367.57 Direct Rendering: YesAudio: Card-1 Intel 8 Series/C220 Series High Definition Audio Controller driver: snd_hda_intel bus-ID: 00:1b.0 chip-ID: 8086:8c20 Card-2 Intel Xeon E3-1200 v3/4th Gen Core Processor HD Audio Controller driver: snd_hda_intel bus-ID: 00:03.0 chip-ID: 8086:0c0c Card-3 Bose driver: USB Audio usb-ID: 003-020 chip-ID: 05a7:1020 Sound: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture v: k4.4.0-21-genericNetwork: Card-1: Qualcomm Atheros Killer E220x Gigabit Ethernet Controller driver: alx port: d000 bus-ID: 02:00.0 chip-ID: 1969:e091 IF: enp2s0 state: up speed: 1000 Mbps duplex: full mac: 34:e6:d7:69:62:2a Card-2: Qualcomm Atheros QCA6174 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter driver: ath10k_pci bus-ID: 03:00.0 chip-ID: 168c:003e IF: wlp3s0 state: up mac: d8:5d:e2:11:64:db Card-3: Atheros usb-ID: 003-006 chip-ID: 0cf3:e300 IF: null-if-id state: N/A speed: N/A duplex: N/A mac: N/ADrives: HDD Total Size: 1126.0GB (22.2% used) ID-1: /dev/sda model: HGST_HTS721010A9 size: 1000.2GB serial: JR10046P22VB2N ID-2: USB /dev/sdb model: DataTraveler_3.0 size: 125.8GB serial: 60A44C3FAFD5B011697B003D-0:0Partition: ID-1: / size: 901G used: 138G (17%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda2 ID-2: swap-1 size: 17.06GB used: 0.00GB (0%) fs: swap dev: /dev/sda3RAID: System: supported: N/A No RAID devices: /proc/mdstat, md_mod kernel module present Unused Devices: noneSensors: System Temperatures: cpu: 64.0C mobo: 27.8C gpu: 0.0:56C Fan Speeds (in rpm): cpu: N/AInfo: Processes: 244 Uptime: 22 days Memory: 5873.0/15933.0MB Init: systemd v: 229 runlevel: 5 default: 2 Gcc sys: 5.4.0 Client: Shell (bash 4.3.421 running in gnome-terminal-) inxi: 2.2.35

For some reason it's fucking broken and no amount of fucking around with Alsa Mixer and Pulse Audio shit will get it work. I need a dev to take a look at my hardware and release a fix for whatever the fuck is wrong. When you go check on linux mint's compatibility thing, it says my audio stuff in my laptop is compatible and there's no problems, but I've had non-stop problems for years and each time a new linux mint comes out it remains broken even with fresh install of the OS

As bitter as I am toward Creative, their products still represented a giant step up from the current status quo.

Oh dear god, that entire situation is so FUBAR. Games have the unique advantage of synthesizing the entire scene from scratch, allowing virtual microphones to take full advantage of the playback system's capabilities. If an API like DS3D or OpenAL is used, such reconfiguration can even be done to closed-source games at the system level, much like GPU drivers forcing new features on old games through D3D/OpenGL/Vulkan.

With music and home theater, on the other hand? Aside from the tiny island of sanity that is binaural sound, home theater has been focused on pointlessly adding to the number of speakers on a horizontal plane since the quadraphonic era. "MORE SPEAKERS, MORE CHANNELS" has lead to 5.1, then 6.1, 7.1, 7.2, and soon 9.2, 11.2, and 22.2.

A more sane approach (dating back to Ambisonics in the 1970s) would be to simply model the instantaneous, volumetric 4D pressure wavefield of a scene, which can easily be calculated from as few as four microphones. This allows sound to be easily and dynamically remixed for any speaker arrangement or other listening setup.

But how are the usual players approaching the challenge of 3D sound that incorporates a Z-axis? DTS:X, Dolby Atmos, and Auro-3D all use a similar system of many (up to 128) tracks coded to point/directional sources each with 3D position/orientation coordinates, which are then rendered to whatever speaker arrangement much like a computer game, except that has zero relationship with what the microphones recorded and relies on extensive human labor to adapt to the format. Even worse, the recommended speaker arrangements are all the typical pointless circle of planar speakers, with a few ceiling speakers, and nothing close to the floor.

The same problem is facing photographic VR content, which is based on the same retarded spherical/cubic pano images from QuickTime VR, with an added Z-channel to fake depth. The correct approach would be lightfield photography, which creates a much more versatile and compact representation.

No, soundcards did hardware 3D when games increasingly used hardware 3D for graphics, and most computers were still using Pentiums or K6s that could barely handle file access for cutting-edge games. Before then, were 286-based potatoes and ancient 8-bit platforms that would cough up blood doing MIDI and 4-channel wavetable standalone, let alone in the background of a game.

Did you try updating?

Sheeeiiiittt, after your last post before this one I was going to ask you how DTS:X or Dolby Atmos compared to DS3D or OpenAL but you already answered my question. I used A3D back then too, Vortex I think.
Had one question left though, what is pointless about a circle of speakers in a 6.1 or 7.1 setup? Seems like you wouldn't get full horizontal surround without at least 6.1. Could maybe give up center channel if you were the only person in the room and always sat in exactly the same spot.

Here's a tldr of user's post and pdfs.

The problem is twofold, due to both the recording/mixing/encoding end, and the playback end.

Playback-wise, having more than 3 speakers for planar surround is helpful for bigger rooms, but there are diminishing returns (unless you're attempting wavefield synthesis, which uses a completely different layout), and additional speakers in a bigger set up mostly just reuse information from other speakers' channels. Even worse, while most material is admittedly focused on a planar soundstage, there has historically been NO ATTEMPT at vertically positioned speakers in mainstream surround sound, and as I noted in my last post, the latest standards only include elevated speakers, no lowered ones. This means that, at best, it will produce a hemispherical soundstage, not a fully spherical one.

In reality, just using speakers arranged at the vertices of regular polyhedra (the minimum being 4 speakers in a tetrahedral layout) would suffice completely with competent decoding.

On the recording/mixing/encoding end, however, there is zero benefit increasing the number of channels if playback platforms are expected to have any decoder crossfeed interpolation capabilities beyond streaming out raw PCM.

Oh, and one other thing, in case I didn't make it completely clear.

3D simulation standards, whether old ones like A3D, DS3D, EAX, and OpenAl; or future ones like VRWorks Audio and TrueAudio Next; are about creating sound from scratch, in realtime, inside interactive virtual 3D environments. This applies ONLY to computer games and simulations, not to things like movies and music.

Spatialization standards, such as stereophonic, surround (DTS:X, Dolby Atmos), and binaural spatializers (Dolby Headphone, DTS Headphone:X CMSS-3D Headphone), are about getting sound that has already been mixed, and playing it as intended through your speakers in your listening environment. This applies to any source of audio.

Though there is sometimes a bit of overlap, the two serve completely different purposes, and the latter complements the former.

I really can't see vr music becoming anything more than a short lived gimmick. Even if vr itself succeeds it will just end up getting rid of soundtracks, I mean fuck the majority of vidya/movie soundtracks are ambient background trash anyway. Only musical use I can see is vr recordings of concerts, which is basically a shittier version of a properly recorded album.

Thanks, that makes sense- as long as the seating area was inside the volume created by 4 points you'd have coverage with appropriate decoding.

When it comes to audio you must also consider that maybe your source file is shitty. I usually get my music form bandcamp, and they sometimes have shit build into that made me think my soundcard died.

I followed, just seems like they are both trying to solve the same problem. The latter is just a more static reproduction compared to the former. Instead of 128 "channels" you assign voices to xyz coordinates with 0 filters/effects and that's half of Atmos. The other half is decoding it over your specific setup of 4 speakers or whatever but you'd want that exact same thing if the source was gaming audio.

USB is not designed for deterministic, hard-real-time data transfer, which is important in high-performance audio applications.

This is the way to go for most consumer applications. Even the coax would work fine.

Which doesn't mean what you think it means.

You'd fail a blind AB test. You can't even define the problem.
top kek

schiit.com/

Except for gaming and content creation, lag isn't an issue. That means you can just drop error-correction buffers on each end and call it a day, so choice of bus really doesn't matter, bits in=bits out. Even bandwidth is irrelevant if you're sending audio that's already compressed and your receiver supports decoding it.

Electrical isolation can be a real problem, though. Some computers I've used had full-on "I can hear mouse clicks over the speakers" ground faults.

Which doesn't really work in a computer-audio application, as the DAC is used for more than just 2-channel music: video, system sounds, and conferencing all demand low-latency playback, and configuring an operating system to use multiple soundcards for different sources is non-trivial.

USB is one of those good-enough-but-not-really solutions that the industry is unfortunately stuck with.

Video works fine, you just need to put in the correct latency in your playback software to sync them if it's bad. Conferencing is also dubious, since typical modern internet stuff like Skype is usually about 50ms, often above 200ms. Even PC UI with modern LCD monitors and USB/cordless mice/keyboards regularly hits 30ms, and often creeps up near 100ms.

Also, configuring audio for an external DAC and general sound separately is very trivial. Most media software has a "DTS/AC3/etc passthrough" option, while most games and conferencing programs now have an option (often default) to send voice and things through a headset separately from everything else.

Now, if on the other hand you want to contend that lag overall is a problem, I completely agree. But the 3ms-12ms delay from USB audio (most of which can be blamed on sucky drivers rather than USB's own shortcomings) is way, way, WAY down the stack of the Dagwood Bumstead shit sandwich that is laggy modern technology:
skytopia.com/project/articles/lag/latency.html

If you also want to note that combining lightweight busses like ADB and heavyweight busses like Firewire was a retarded idea, USB should never have existed, and every division of Intel's engineering staff belong in a mass grave ASAP, I agree with that as well. But it looks like we're stuck with USB forever, so the best that can be done is to force the features we want inside the USB standard.

listening to chiru.no with my sr-007

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Stats are a mystery to me. My experience with my set has been a love story. All the justifications of stat superiority were true, at least relative to a small number of Audio Technica models. However, when I ever commend them I receive flat refusals that they could potentially be better and get tomes of sampling theory thrown at my face, seemingly to the point of denying there ever being a rationale for stat development in the first place.

...

I've had my hd598s for like 6 years and never had any sign of degradation or wear even though I used to wear them outside at school all the time and pretty much wear them every day all day at home. The cord has broken many times though because I inadvertently start making twists and knots with it around my finger, so I've had to buy spares.

I don't know anything when it comes to this but I have money to burn and I would like to improve my audio experience.

Anybody have a guide that deals with both headphones and the best input methods?

There's no guide. The absolute best value for money is probably Stax from Yahoo auctions. You can obtain a basic system for under $200 which can be mated to an appropriate 100v transformer or psu from mjolnir-audio.

I had the beyerdynamic dt 770 for 5 years, but gave it to my mother because I recently bought a new one. And from what I heard she still uses them.

I bought a pair of $15 headphones 5 years ago and they're still doing awesome, and sound great.

Well, that's what I mean. At least one single very popular and talented audio designer and composer is making an objective approach to develop the capabilities of VR sound and music. The competition will be forthcoming.

Except with audyssey you actually do place a mic at ear level at different listening locations around the room. Most movie-watching isn't being done from the top of bunk beds so Z-axis compensation mic-wise isn't a big deal. Not to say that the sound generation itself isn't important, but I digress. Truly perfect sound-replication is cost prohibitive, and I would be uninterested in ever purchasing such a system due to that cost.

Are independent media labs experimenting with the possibilities of such technology? Absolutely. Audyssey was founded by a couple such researchers from USC, which is just a few miles East of me. Their multimedia development facilities and campuses are sprinkled around the LA area, apparently, as I've come across at least two over the past couple years.

Very interesting. Again, that video is proof enough that the technology can be spotted on the horizon, it's only a matter of time before creatives begin to pull it closer towards them and trailblaze for the rest of the industry, much like 3D movement was for Super Mario 64, and, what I argue, will be VR sound design for the VR game I mentioned earlier.

Impressive, very nice.

I should play those Thief games sometime soon.

If you'd carefully read my comment you'd see the potential I see.

If you've ever seen a full symphony orchestra perform live you will know that moving your head to look at certain musicians play vs. others can dramatically affect the sound that enters your ears due to the change of direction. At times I must force myself to look straight forward to get a balanced input from each section.

> Even if vr itself succeeds it will just end up getting rid of soundtracks

Extreme citations needed.

If you were unaware before, have you noticed how many AAA titles go with classical music as their primary soundtrack? It's a vast majority, and many composers truly write music worth listening to.

Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's shit there are world-touring orchestral concerts for video game music whether you like it or not, and people pay money over the cost of a new AAA video game to go see them.

I don't think you understood what I was talking about. When I talk about mics, I'm not talking about speaker calibration. I'm talking about the original process of recording content from meatspace and encoding it for distribution.

Everything I'm aware of from Audyssey appears to be about setting up a loudspeaker system to play back existing material better, a room-centric equivalent of using mics to produce custom HRTF FIRs for individual headphone listeners (I've heard of this before in the realm of calibrating professional mixing room monitors, though I forget whether I'd run across Audyssey before). In particular, DSX has no encoding format, and would in theory require an actual encoding like Atmos/DTS:X/Auro-3D in order to do anything beyond interpolating from extant 7.1 content.

Even the 3'-4' gap between a seated listener and the floor would be adequate for reproducing declination cues. Something like a cubic 8-speaker "double quad" layout would be an enormous improvement.

Two problems. First, the soundfield/lightfield volumetric systems I referred to are already decades old. Second, dominant standards are being hashed out as we speak, and authors are being crippled by the limits of these standards, because no major players are backing sane architectures. If the standards are too crippling? The entire format will collapse from apathy like SACD/DVD-A. Remember that Nintendo was already an industry giant.

I looked around a little to see what Marty's been up to, and I honestly can't see what you're talking about. Golem is just a game (not a standardized recording) with a dynamic soundtrack in the mold of LucasArts' 1990s-era iMUSE, and Echoes of the First Dreamer is just a mundane album pressed on vinyl. Maybe you're referring to something else?

Do you remember those multimedia CD-ROM music titles that allowed you to toggle tracks on and off, and move instruments around the virtual "theater", for a dynamic mix effect? What about the Laserdisc/DVD feature of allowing viewers to toggle between alternate angles from multicam shoots in movies and TV?

I always liked that sort of thing, but it has a poor performance record in the marketplace, both by mass audiences who just want to passively consume, and authors who are averse to such idiosyncratically human-labor-intensive formats.

Ah, yes, the source. I did incorrectly read your comment.

Well yeah, but it bumps up against that cost, again. If you happen to be extremely wealthy I'm sure you'd have no qualms, but would I really purchase 6 extra B&W bookshelf speakers for that benefit, as well as an amp capable of driving those 6 extra front-only speakers? No, I wouldn't.

Would I purchase a VR headset that maybe had a similar but miniaturized layout of speakers per ear at massively reduced cost? If it cost about a grand, I really might.

Obviously we both want the state of media to improve, I just think VR headsets have greater potential as a segue into the recording of positional media than people having to go out and purchase a half-dozen more speakers at several hundred dollars a pop.

But was the technology present to utilize those? People didn't have speaker-encompassed rooms or VR headsets decades ago. Volumetric sound effects ported to a VR headset would be a potent combination. I'm not sure what makes you think it wouldn't be.

If I'm reading correctly you are confusing the enormous hurdle of needing to press a mass-produced physical object to be read by mass-produced physical hardware with something as simple as a codec or driver update. I don't think VR headset manufacturers are setting hardware limits to the 3D spaces their products are capable of simulating. Something like, "You can look up, but not STRAIGHT up. That won't be in the standard...and sound can only come from the 4 cardinal directions." It will come down to the sound designers and coders to pick the resolution of the sound and music they produce. As you say, software-side the techology has been around for years, it's just that the hardware hasn't.

He's talked at sound and game development conferences about the approaches they are taking to the sound design for the game. The game in and of itself is not special.

Nope, but I can imagine it being REALLY uninteresting to listen to in stereo.

Nope, but I can see that being VERY cool in VR - being able to "walk" around a scene. Then again, the average person's/my sense of cinematography is inferior to that of tasteful directors, so it might actually detract from the experience on second thought.

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The potential is a gimmick experience that people will try once and leave alone forever, just like alt takes on DVDs from years ago.

Well I'm thinking of all the immersive non-"movie" games I've played and most of them had almost no soundtrack, it was minimal or situational.

There used to be guides in the headphone generals back on /g/. I wrote one a few years ago, no idea if they still use it.

General advice.
If you're starting out and have nothing but your PC, get a pair of decent headphones. For closed look into the MDR-V6, MDR-7506 or the ATH-M50X. All of these will be driven adequately by your motherboards on board sound output. You may find that this is enough, especially if you have only ever had shit headphones. If you want to get into more expensive headphones such as the DT880 or the HD600, you're going to need an amp and possibly a DAC. Even then it's not necessary to spend vasy amounts of money. I get plenty of enjoyment out of my midrange system.

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Guess we'll find out.

Super HD, user.

Buy Sennheiser HD558 if you love comfort and quality. Buy ATH-M50 if you like nigger-tier bass and extremely hot/sweaty ears.

every consumer scum

Recent a4tech headphones have VERY neutral frequency response and are pretty cheap too. The magnets are powerful enough to reach loudspeaker-tier loudness without cracking although the build quality (mostly plastic case and the cabling) is quite poor or wears easily unless handled with care or you know how to replace parts.

Any EM loudspeaker less than 30cm is trash. Separate tweeter and woofer optional.

Not that user but those sounds are probably analog signals noises emitted from monitors (eventually leaked to sound card and sometimes even muted speakers). Also happens if your headset jack have shitty contacts, audiophiles are right about this thing.

Tube TVs emit high pitch noises at around 12kHz and audiophiles claimers who can't hear them are charlatans. Even charging batteries emit same high-pitched noise.

Displaying pure black and white stripes on monitor and putting them into motion can make LCD Monitors screetch and roar different pitchs. Some old laptops also screetch differently depending on what is displayed on screen, link related:
www.google.com/patents/US6506148
still usin proprietary OS huh?

found the kabbalist :^)

mintfags. everytime...

electrostatic headphones
or
a4tech T500. currently using MK650-S a4tech.com/product.asp?cid=66&scid=125&id=436

HT has already been at 7.1 for years, one more speaker won't hurt. And in theory as few as a 4-speaker tetrahedral layout (one straight down, three low and angled somewhat upward) could also work.

All that's really needed for sound is any normal set of headphones (custom-fit in-ear canalphones are ideal, but the difference isn't that big) and a head tracker of some kind, which has never been very expensive. The only part that's sort of new is the cheap computers for spatial audio processing, though any off-the-shelf DSP could've done an acceptable job cheaply in the '80s, if people were interested.

I was also thinking of the need for both consumers and producers to invest in totally revamped ADC/DAC and toolchains to produce adequate results in 24/48-192, or worse yet, completely different digital technology in the case of SACD's non-PCM DSD bitstream. If the leap in functionality isn't big enough, nobody will take the bait.

But you're right that what we're talking about is (at least, for consumers, NOT AT ALL for authors) purely a software problem.

Thought about from the opposite direction, the strictures of linear media like film could be seen as detracting from the greater connection possible between artist and audience via competently designed interactive media like games, museum exhibits, and live theater. This is a problem hamhanded filmschool dropouts constantly proven by the "indy dev" scene that caused GamerGate with their old-media culture clash, and are currently stinking up VR.

I've updated multiple times over the years and the audio is still fucking broken.

I can boot up my laptop with a cutting-edge linux distro that has the latest kernal and it still won't work.

Nobody seems to be aware of the issues with my hardware and trying to fix it.

I've updated multiple times over the years and the audio is still fucking broken.

I can boot up my laptop with a cutting-edge linux distro that has the latest kernal and it still won't work.

Nobody seems to be aware of the issues with my hardware and trying to fix it.

assuming you've already tried the latest release of live gentoo

try
dmesg|grep "Warn"
dmesg|grep "Error"dmesg|grep "Audio"
also try full lowercaps

...

Actually how about you go fuck yourself

My mobo's poorly grounded audio causes a kind of hiss when the CPU is active, a sound like muffled footsteps in the snow whenever the USB ports are active, and a kind of distinctive sound when the HDD is accessed.

…but there are analog parts, too. It's a DAC, which means it's making an analog signal, and the guy's concern is that having it right the fuck there inside of the chassis EM echochamber might affect the output analog signal.

Seconding this. Want a nice pair of noise cancelling headphones but am concerned with hearing loss. I've searched it up but can't find a concrete answer.

It is 15625 kHz, nigger.
Well, may be a little different in USA, but 12? unlikely.

Tell me moar. Where can I get these for normal price? I mean under $400.
And what about side effects? I heard somewhere that they can zap you or cause some health problems like headache.

Tell me moar. Where can I get these for normal price? I mean under $400.
And what about side effects? I heard somewhere that they can zap you or cause some health problems like headache.>>699127

how is that related to LCD?
the link is about CRT tubes and nobody uses them in 2017.

Older LCDs use fluorescent tubes for backlighting, which commonly produce noise. Newer LED-backlit LCDs should be silent except for perhaps the PSU, which may produce audible transformer hum.

backlight doesn't depend on the picture

598s are pretty nice I must say. Better than the last pair of studio cans I had. And yeah they are durable.

On the other hand from what I just said about the 598s, Sony used to make really nice cheap phones years and years ago. They don't now really, of course, but then they've had plenty of trouble outside of Playstation so par for the course.

reminder that nobody loves audiophiles