 |
 |
|
|
|
|
| news | | | Audigy™ | | | features | | | musician | | | tech/info | | | drivers | | | download | | | wishlist | | | polls | | | links |
3D Audio Terminology Half of the discussion in this group about what is "3D" and what isn't comes down to pointless semantics. For the record, the term "stereophonic" means 3-dimensional sound! (From the Greek "stereos", meaning "solid" and if you can't figure out "phonic" read no further.) When QSound Labs entered this business, we called our initial speaker-targeted process "QSound." Not a great choice, given that we have a whole family of algorithms now, but the point is we didn't call it "3D audio." In the intervening years, the market has been flooded with all manner of technologies that extend the ability of a limited number of physical speakers to position audio convincingly in space, and everybody calls them all "3D". Long ago I gave up on this issue. Sorry folks, the term has escaped the lab and is in common use, so debating what should be called "3D" is pretty much pointless now. Consider that there's something called "3D graphics" which is widely accepted as meaning "2D rendering of a 3D model." Then there's technology that creates the actual perception of depth, and some people argue that the term "3D" as applied to graphics should be reserved for this. I'd say until we have 360 degrees of wraparound image with depth perception, that doesn't really count as "3D" either if you want to split hairs. Is there any point to arguing about this? Isn't it better to understand the technologies and what they do, rather than fuss about what they're called? It's too late to have an effect on the latter anyway.
The important thing is to distinguish between types of 3D audio technologies first by function (ignoring for the moment what success they achieve). This gives us: Stereo Expansion which operates on existing differential stereo information, in order to extend the apparent width of the sound field (i.e. primarily useful for non-3D stereo content like recorded music) Positional 3D Audio which operates on multiple individual sound streams and attempts to position each one independently in 3D space, and, Virtual Surround which operates on decoded surround-format material with the goal of reproducing the various channels in their correct perspective from a more limited number of physical drivers… e.g. five-channel audio from two speakers. Stereo expansion and virtual surround are primarily useful in consumer electronics like stereo systems, home theatre etc., but since some of these technologies cross over to the PC (listening to tunes via the CD-ROM player or Internet broadcast, watching DVD movies) they have legit applications on there as well. The big ticket item on the computer, though, is positional 3D audio. All of these technologies are considered valuable by the lion's share of consumers in their correct respective applications. Therefore 3D sound is no joke, it's a useful and rapidly-growing technology in music production, consumer electronics, video-games, yadda yadda yadda. What is indeed a joke is the amount of misinformation and partisanism characteristic of the subject--most of it resulting from marketing claims made for various products, and a general lack of audio and especially 3D audio knowledge. I've seen both silly simplifications and equally silly counter-statements about how 3D audio works in this newsgroup, mostly from people who have no apparent direct experience.
|
Our Sponsor:  |
||||||||||||
|
|
||
 Back To Top |
h t t p : // a l i v e . s i n g n e t . c o m . s g
|
Copyright © 1998-2003 ALive! and its writers.
|
