EAX and Gaming
New EAX features finally debut with the Audigy, after going into some sort of freeze after EAX 2.0 was introduced in 1999 in the midst of the A3D vs EAX wars. EAX has enjoyed widespread support since its introduction in 1998, but is still notoriously missing in some first-person shooters where the use of DirectSound3D positioning and EAX would have the most impact.
 The advanced features are now named "EAX ADVANCED HD". Annoyingly, the name is all in caps. Its extremely long compared to the snappy and cool-sounding "EAX", and would be a complete pain for us who run web sites and have to type this phrase repeatedly (as if the excalamtion mark in Live! isn't torture enough). For brevity sake, its going to be called EAXAHD in this site.
The first of the new EAX features are dubbed "EAX ADVANCED HD Game Audio Library" consisting of a bunch of confusing terms (all trademarked) to sell the effects processing ability of the Audigy. This time round, the EAX features are significantly upgraded and the EAX Gold Mine Experience demo is very effective in showing off the new features. It runs in a primitive 3D engine where you can even walk through objects, but that is not the point of the demo. The demo itself contains even more confusing terms like exclusion that was not mentioned in the press releases and sales brochure. Nevertheless, after sitting through the demo, it really makes me want an EAXAHD game right now, but there isn't one!
Environment Panning
On standard EAX, environment presets can only be applied to all sound that is played back, so there's no direction and everything is reverberated. With Environment Panning, you can hear reverberation from sound sources coming from one direction, while sound from the other directions are not affected by this reverberation. The demo shows bats flying out from a tunnel to the right, and I could hear the reverbed sound of the bats to my right as they flew out from the tunnel.
Environment Reflections
Instead of just slapping a reverb over a sound and having it sound in all speakers, this feature allows a reflected sound to be positioned. The EAX Gold Mine demo demonstrates this to great effect. The short and quickly overlapping relfections of an eagle "squawk"-ing away in the canyon were reflected as usual, but the direction of the reflection of the squawks as the eagle is flying and encircling the listener can be discerned. This is very useful in games
Environment Filtering
These simulate the muffling effect when the direct path of a sound of blocked, leaving only the reflected parts of the sound to reach the listener. Such effects are also available in EAX 2.0 for the Live!
Environment Morphing
This fixes a common complaint with EAX games, where the EAX preset would abruptly change when the character passes the boundary between two different EAX settings. It would be close to the real world if sounds would slowly change, as you move, for example, from the outside to the inside of an echo-ey empty house. The EAX Gold Mine demo shows this off by making the character's footsteps gradually more reverberant as it moved from the quiet outdoors into a mining tunnel.
Multi Environment
Unlike the Live! which is limited to one EAX reverb at any time, the Audigy can apply four simultaneous reverbs at once to simulate different environments in a scene. In the Audigy Experience demo, four sounds were played at different locations, and each had a different EAX preset.
Exclusion
The EAX Gold Mine demo didn't demonstrate this well, but it seemed to occlude and muffle sound when the object producing the sound is not in a direct line of sight with the position of the character. The demo has a cart moving from an unseen area into an opening of a tunnel. The sound of the cart is clear only when the cart can be seen.
Extreme Effects
Already found in some 3D audio algorithms from competitors, the Audigy can finally model sounds that are loud and overwhelming. For instance, a train in a tunnel passing you would literally produce sound and reverberation from all directions instead of just moving from one side to the other. In the demo, a zombie's evil laughter is magnified many times when Extreme Effects is turned on. When done correct, this effect could shake players up in a first-person shooter like Undying!
The Audigy is compatible with EAX 1.0 and EAX 2.0 and uses similar reverberation algorithms, so the effects is nearly indistinguishable from what the Live! can do, which is good since game developers tweak EAX with the Live! (and hopefully they move on to EAXAHD or we'll be stuck with EAX 2.0 or even stereo).
Like all other Sound Cards, the 3D positioning capability relies on Microsoft's DirectSound3D API. In my limited listening tests, the 3D audio engine for 4 and 5.1 speakers are slightly improved and provide better positioning. The headphone mode is also provides more convincing virtual 3D positioning compared to the algorithms used in the Live! Creative attributes this to the use of "higher order HRTF filters". The number of channel remains the same as the Live! - 32 DirectSound3D channels and 64 DirectSound channels.
EAXAHD for Music
The next set of EAXAHD features deal with music playback, and are dubbed "EAX ADVANCED HD Music Technologies". These features are only available in PlayCenter 3.
Audio Clean-Up
This feature attempts to remove the pops and clicks of bad sound sources and is pretty successful in my limited testing. There's even an option to play only the clicks that are removed so that you have an idea what the algorithm is doing.
DREAM (Dynamic Repositioning of Enhanced Audio & Music)
This is a gimmicky audio effect that spins sound around you according to the parameters defined. Its rather dizzying and I wouldn't recommend you listen to music like that, unless its for dance or techno music, and you have a party at home. Nevertheless, its definitely a "wow" effect that's nice to show to friends.
Time Scaling
Time Scaling is the only feature that isn't new. The Live! also has time scaling and it works just fine here. You can speed up and slow down and the Audigy will compensate for the speed changes and make the audio play at the original pitch. Great for media like audio books, or to dissect a complex piece of music.
A corny title for sure, but I couldn't think of a better one. Audio Clean-Up and DREAM apparently make use of the CPU to process the effects. A 5-10% CPU utilization when playing MP3 files became 15-25% when either of these features were turned on! Could this be that the Audigy (like the EMU10K1 found on the Live!) are just effects processors and cannot do more complex stuff like real-time audio filtering and random audio positioning?
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You can see a parallel of this in the 3D graphics industry. We have yet to see games make full use of NVIDIA's GeForce 3's programmability largely because most of the other users still have older graphic cards like the GeForce and the early Radeons. As a result, many gaming engines are compromised for the sake of backward compatibility.
However, developers of games for the XBOX did not shy away from exploiting the programmable NVIDIA GPU because every XBOX has the same chip so supporing it to the fullest and designing an engine around the same GPU provides great benefits.
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When the Live! was introduced, it actually came with an EAX-enhanced demo of Unreal, which showed the world how cool multi-speaker gaming was.
Its strange that Creative did not do something like that for the Audigy, given the significant improvements in EAX. The appeal to gamers is watered down with zero games announced or released with EAXAHD support, even 2 months down the road when this review was completed.
It is key that Creative goes all out to convince game developers to support EAXAHD. This is going to be a challenge because the huge majority of sound cards sold in the past 3 years do not have EAXAHD (and only EAX 1.0 or 2.0) support.
Let's hope enough effort goes into the "evangelization" of EAXAHD. The absolute worst scenario is that EAXAHD flops because developers choose to support only EAX 2.0 since other sound cards only support that, and its not worth their effort to do extra work for EAXAHD.
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