I found a room in FEAR that has machine noise emanating from the center and concrete columns near it. Sound is occluded by the columns. I noticed that the machine noise is essentially muted. It's almost inaudible. In real life you would hear the noise reverberating off of the concrete walls. I compared this on both Audigy and X-Fi they sound the same.

FEAR has very exciting audio work but I guess it could still be a lot better. 😀 The occlusion effects in particular tend to be overdone for some reason.

I also seem to have somehow eliminated the X-Fi popping problems I was having with FEAR. I don't know what happened. I suppose it could be something that comes and goes... Strange.

Well unless this is an ALchemy specific issue it's probably just a flaw with the sound design rather than a hardware or driver problem. Actually I did play that game a bit with ALchemy on my Audigy 2 ZS and didn't notice anything special. Other than it being too boring anyway, but at least the engine doesn't have these crippling issues on modern GPUs that are present in Doom 3/Quake 4...

Yeah it's the game's sound design. I was using XP. No Alchemy translation.

As for the boredom, I think I'd rather play it than Quake4 and Doom3 even though none of them are particularly astonishing. FEAR has the squad AI that's at least somewhat fun to deal with. FEAR seems to be more demanding though even with its simpler visuals. The Lithtech curse.

Just a couple of things about F.E.A.R.
It's using EAX 4 (with DirectSound)

And you may be interested especially to the last of these links

Also, we met again ZQ. 😊

EDIT: oh, and I guess there might be something related to some of the tech mentioned here, here

mirh wrote:

Also, we met again ZQ. 😊

Heyo! Did you see that I've started on writing new drivers for the Vortex2?
Yepp! after all these years it's finally getting done by someone super motivated to do it!

ZanQuance wrote:

mirh wrote:

Also, we met again ZQ. 😊

Heyo! Did you see that I've started on writing new drivers for the Vortex2?
Yepp! after all these years it's finally getting done by someone super motivated to do it!

Jesus christ.
First open source drivers. Then perhaps x64 and >Vista..
Then a universal wrapper..
and the world! 🤣

I'm rather confused on the "claims" Creative is notorious for making.

"The Sound Blaster X-Fi audio processor packs in over 51 million transistors and is 24 times more powerful than its predecessor, the
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS."

The X-FI is claimed to have 10,340 mips of performance (7,000mips of those are from the SampleRate Converter(SRC)), and at 24 times the power of the predecessor...
This means that the Audigy2 ZS only had 430 mips of power, yet the live! was "claimed" to have over 1,000mips to compete with the "paltry" 600mips of the Vortex2.

So that means as per the tomshardware article they were cherry picking the numbers and not fairly comparing apples to apples.

I never even heard a x-fi card... 6 used cards have past my hardware room the last years and every single one of them was dead. Don't know if these things break much more easily but i never had this many soundcards that were broken. Not a scratch on them, they simply didn't work. Too bad as there were some expensive ones 😐

Every single audigy i ever had still works. Still using an audigy4 in my i5 system and it never gave me problems. audigy1 and 2 are used in older pc's. Live! seems to be bullet proof also.

Ok my cousin came to visit and brought me his unused Audgy4 (CA10300 chip). Having played with it now I am really disappointed, without CMSS-3D it offers nothing in the way of DS3D positional audio and has basic panning only. With CMSS-3D on you get some HRTF but the quality just isn't there, also it lacks any elevation filters (an X-FI only feature provided by Sensaura).

I vote the X-FI now as a clear winner in 3D audio testing vs the Audigy2 and Audigy4.

Tried to make a comparison video, but it refused to record the Stereo mix with CMSS-3D enabled (acts and sounds like it's not). I would have to get another audio passthrough cable seeing I use my other to pipe in the Vortex2 through the Audigy4 to quickly switch between them during testing.

All in all the HRTF from the Vortex2 is leaps and bounds better in quality. Since it's done entirely in the hardware all DS3D games get it, unlike CMSS-3D which has to be enabled to get anything at all.

What software were you testing with to come to these conclusions? And yeah CMSS must be enabled for 3D audio.

I couldn't hear any headphone elevation filter effects in FEAR. I want to find a game that makes it apparent. Maybe something with more of a 3D world to it. I don't know if I play the right games for it to matter 🤣

ZanQuance wrote:

Tried to make a comparison video, but it refused to record the Stereo mix with CMSS-3D enabled (acts and sounds like it's not). I would have to get another audio passthrough cable seeing I use my other to pipe in the Vortex2 through the Audigy4 to quickly switch between them during testing.

All in all the HRTF from the Vortex2 is leaps and bounds better in quality. Since it's done entirely in the hardware all DS3D games get it, unlike CMSS-3D which has to be enabled to get anything at all.

With Creative, you always had to configure the card into headphone mode and enable CMSS-3D. Under XP also set speakers to headphone. Under modern Windows, set speakers to 5.1 and Sound Blaster into headphone mode with SBX Pro surround enabled. It will map virtual 5.1 speakers over headphones.

Best to record / capture the direct output with another machine. Or route the output back into line-in and record with Audacity.

CMSS-3D on a X-Fi can sound pretty impressive, but it does depend on the game. Splinter Cell Chaos Theory is quite a good one. FEAR is good, so is BF2142. It gave me quite an edge hearing the position of sounds.

One area that these cards are somewhat "better" compared to Vortex 2 is when you use a 5.1 surround speaker set. I'm not sure if the quad speaker setup on the Vortex 2 will work with standard surround speakers, but then I never tried this, always went for the headphone option.

philscomputerlab wrote:

CMSS-3D on a X-Fi can sound pretty impressive, but it does depend on the game. Splinter Cell Chaos Theory is quite a good one. FEAR is good, so is BF2142. It gave me quite an edge hearing the position of sounds.

In FEAR, as I've said a few times now, I literally hear no difference between Audigy and X-Fi. With headphones. I couldn't identify any elevation effect.

philscomputerlab wrote:

With Creative, you always had to configure the card into headphone mode and enable CMSS-3D. Under XP also set speakers to headphone. Under modern Windows, set speakers to 5.1 and Sound Blaster into headphone mode with SBX Pro surround enabled. It will map virtual 5.1 speakers over headphones.

X-Fi PCI and X-Fi Ti don't have SBX Pro. The Windows-set-to-5.1 trick is valid though. It may also be necessary to set the game to 5.1.

Ah, right, got confused with the X-Fi MB3.

philscomputerlab wrote:

Ah, right, got confused with the X-Fi MB3.

Do you happen to know of a game that makes the X-Fi elevation filter apparent?

[Monster reply incoming]

swaaye wrote:

What software were you testing with to come to these conclusions? And yeah CMSS must be enabled for 3D audio.
I couldn't hear any headphone elevation filter effects in FEAR. I want to find a game that makes it apparent. Maybe something with more of a 3D world to it. I don't know if I play the right games for it to matter 🤣

Sorry for the late reply, I tested with various DS3D games along with Rightmark3Daudio, Sensaura Player3D and A3D Player 3.0 all which allow manual elevation control and positioning of sounds. By placing the sounds manually to specific locations I can swap between the cards and compare the HRTF very clearly. I will record a video of this comparison soon.

swaaye wrote:

Do you happen to know of a game that makes the X-Fi elevation filter apparent?

American McGee's Alice right off the get go, it has lots of sounds above you in the first level and is a great tester for this, there is a rocking mill stone which you can stand under and listen to it roll. The game supports EAX 2.0 and A3D 2.0.

philscomputerlab wrote:

With Creative, you always had to configure the card into headphone mode and enable CMSS-3D. Under XP also set speakers to headphone. Under modern Windows, set speakers to 5.1 and Sound Blaster into headphone mode with SBX Pro surround enabled. It will map virtual 5.1 speakers over headphones.

But what happens when you do this? The game audio API now internally pre-mixes all sounds to 5.1 channels for output, then CMSS has to take those 5.1 sounds and use HRTF to interpolate virtual speakers between them. This is akin to how the new RazerSurround, THX prostudio/SBX, and Dolby Headphone work. It is far better to be working with the original audio streams via DS3D, GameCoda API (Sensaura), or A3D. This way a false HRTF upmixing does not occur.

philscomputerlab wrote:

Best to record / capture the direct output with another machine. Or route the output back into line-in and record with Audacity.

I'll just reverse the capture order and go Audigy->Aureal->Capture and that fixes the problem.

philscomputerlab wrote:

CMSS-3D on a X-Fi can sound pretty impressive, but it does depend on the game. Splinter Cell Chaos Theory is quite a good one. FEAR is good, so is BF2142. It gave me quite an edge hearing the position of sounds.

Yes because the X-FI is supposed to be using Sensauras HRTF, but apparently as reported there is not an audible difference between an Audigy2zs and the X-FI in HRTF quality. I can only base my X-FI listening experience on youtube videos demonstrating it which may not portray the X-FI accurately enough.

philscomputerlab wrote:

One area that these cards are somewhat "better" compared to Vortex 2 is when you use a 5.1 surround speaker set. I'm not sure if the quad speaker setup on the Vortex 2 will work with standard surround speakers, but then I never tried this, always went for the headphone option.

Yeah this is something I've only tested briefly when I had my RCA theater system w/spdif and Dolby Digital 5.1. The code to do this is in the drivers but disabled until the Aureal/Dolby license was finalized. The SQ3500 was also supposed to accelerate the encode/decode of Dolby 5.1 support but not be the sole provider of it. I'll be hacking into the Win98 drivers later on and I'll see if it's something than can be enabled. The Vortex2 chip itself can handle 10-channel output.

swaaye wrote:

philscomputerlab wrote:

Ah, right, got confused with the X-Fi MB3.

Do you happen to know of a game that makes the X-Fi elevation filter apparent?

BF2142 I believe. But there are no more servers AFAIK. But you can play with bots.

Re: CMSS-3D. Seeing as I originally set up my Audigy 2 ZS with the 7.1 T7700 speaker set, I was more interested in the "Stereo Surround" feature of CMSS-3D, where it simply duplicates the 2-channel stereo into the side and rear channels. This allows audio that does not natively come in 6/8 channels to be heard from all speakers, but without any processing which attempts to "simulate" a surround effect (which may be nice but is often unnatural). It also has a slider that allows to change the balance between the front and the rear, so that you can adjust for distance differences between you and the speakers around the room.