Surely this is like the raytracing scenario for GPUs. There are always slightly harder, and better ways of doing something which the accelerators are better at

Surely this is like the raytracing scenario for GPUs. There are always slightly harder, and better ways of doing something which the accelerators are better at. Audio acceleration I guess peaked too early or they just couldn't get the tech demos as impressive as graphics. I remember reading about a demo, which I believe was from Matrox. They managed to get an audio 3D environment working over a pair of stereo headphones which was good enough that you could play Doom headless. Just close your eyes and you could tell where people were. A lot of what I read about here is that prerecorded samples is good enough, in the same way that raster lighting is good enough and raytracing is a waste of time.