Just want to correct a few things - OpenAL came much, much later in the history of sound cards. Back in the day there were two 3 […]
Show full quote
Just want to correct a few things - OpenAL came much, much later in the history of sound cards. Back in the day there were two 3d sound standards - A3D from Aureal, and DirectSound3D. EAX was an effects layer on top of DirectSound3D. They were all roughly equal in terms of HRTFs and positioning, but where they differed was environmental modeling (reverb.)
A3D was the first 3D sound standard, a full top to bottom proprietary solution from aureal. A3D 1.0 was pretty basic, but A3D 2.0's and it's primary distinguishing feature was wavetracing (think raytracing for sound). It was undeniably the better tech, but the cards were more expensive, fewer games supported it, and it had a bigger impact on system performance.
DS3D was roughly equivalent to A3D 1.0, and didn't support wavetracing. But it did positioning well, and that was its primary job - technically it was just an abstraction layer that passed the positional data up to the sound card. What the card did with that data was it's own business, whether its HRTFs, multichannel, etc. Pretty much everything supported basic DS3D, including Aureal cards.
But it didn't do reverb. That's where EAX came in. Instead of calculating the actual waves, it just modeled the reverb statistically - kind of like the reverb presets in a sound card control panel or AV receiver, but somewhat more sophisticated. Less sophisticated than A3D for sure, but it was cheaper, much easier to implement and basically had zero performance impact - and to my ears it sounded much better than A3D 2.0. And it was an "open" standard as well - other companies could implement EAX (up to version 3.0). Even aureal cards supported it (poorly). Believe it or not even NVIDIA had a motherboard chipset called nforce that did really good 3D audio and EAX.
It should be pretty obvious why EAX "won" that war. I think Aureal could have done great things, but they were ahead of their time in some ways. A3D 3.0, which never came out, was going to be awesome. Anyway, eventually aureal caved in under the pressure of creative's lawsuits. Creative bought their remnants, and eventually moved up to EAX 4.0 and 5.0, which was for creative cards only. It was more advanced than A3D 2.0 in some ways, but still simpler in other ways. One could make the argument that creative's monopoly killed the market for 3D audio, but IMO most people just didn't give enough of a shit about sound to support a dedicated sound card market when onboard became "good enough". And with onboard sound becoming the predominant sound device, CPUs being generally fast enough to handle the processing, and Microsoft being distracted by the xbox - MS decided to simplify things and cut out DS3D. They didn't force out or put anything in the way of hardware 3D audio, they just dropped support for it in DirectX. And since EAX was built on top of DS3D, killing DS3D effectively killed EAX, and killing EAX effectively killed 3D audio.
Of course this was pulling the rug out from under creative's feet, and trying to prop up the little known and used OpenAL was the dying gasp - Creative's attempt to salvage hardware 3D audio. And very few games used it. And that was like 10 years ago. Creative didn't refuse to use 3D audio and HRTFs - they wanted nothing more in the world than for people to use that stuff....but no one else did. To this day their sound cards support all of that, and simply no one is interested in using any of it. They reason they implemented downmixing is because they had to, because that's the way the entire industry was headed.
HRTFs are still everywhere though, although its primarily in the form of downmixing 7.1/5.1 to stereo on headphones. And TBH, it doesn't sound that much worse that "real" 3D. You lost the height cues, but they were never that great to begin with. HRTFs were never fully convincing anyway, because they were only half of the solution - the other primary way your brain locates sounds is how sound sources move when your head turns, even a fraction of a degree. There are pretty expensive and crazy ways to do this with standard headphones (smyth realizer), but with VR it's kind of a freebie that comes along with the head tracking. HRTFs alone = meh. HRTFs + Head Tracking = OMG real.
But at this point, CPUs are so powerful that HRTFs are trivial to do in software. So either way we would have reached the point where sound cards were obsolete. Maybe Microsoft jumped the gun by ripping it out with Vista, but at that point Creative was really the only one left. And they did everything they could to stave off the inevitable death of 3D sound cards. Yes, something was lost in that transition, but overall sound is WAY better than it was in the 90s. And IMO the sound blaster Z still has the best sounding downmixing solution out there, so they're still doing what they can. So cut them a little slack - yeah, they were really dirty at times, but the walls were closing in on that entire sector. In my eyes they've always made the best sound cards - long before 3D audio was a thing (SB16, AWE32, AWE64), while 3D audio was a thing (SB Live, Audigy, X-Fi), and after 3D audio was a thing (X-Fi, SB-Z). If anything they've been trying to keep the dream alive long after everyone else moved on.
