5 ms·

Weird. My experience has always been that headphones are more effective at producing precise 3D sound than speakers. And intuitively, it seems like they should,

Weird. My experience has always been that headphones are more effective at producing precise 3D sound than speakers. And intuitively, it seems like they should, because they can feed each ear with exactly the sound that ear should hear. That said it does require that the game has good 3D sound generation, which isn't trivial, especially differentiating front and back which requires accounting for the shape of the human ear.

Waterluvian 4y ago
You generally need special headphones for that and they really didn't work that well 20 years ago. I don't recall there being any way to tell the Half Life engine or my sound card "output 6 channels to the headphones" and the engine wouldn't do A3D if it was a stereo device. By having a 5.1 setup surrounding me (about 2 feet away in each direction, it was.. cluttered), the brain produces a surround sound effect the way it does in normal life. An expert would have to speak further about how headphones can emulate that, but I don't recall it ever really being a thing in the early 2000s.
- kentonv 4y ago
  I have a vivid memory of playing Doom 2 on a 486 in the 90's, hiding in a building with a cyberdemon circling around the outside, and being able to tell exactly where he was based on sound alone. Needless to say Doom produced no more than 2 channels of audio. Interestingly Doom's audio code was licensed from a third party. When they open sourced it, they had to rewrite that part; I think Carmack said he backported Quake's code. I wonder if that third-party code was just really good or something.
  - deadbunny 4y ago
    I had the same experience with doom 2; heard an Imp fireballing me directly behind me so perfectly I spun around in my chair.
- rzzzt 4y ago
  The Sierra version of Half-Life had EAX support, IIRC, with strangely long reverberations each time you walked on something made out of metal. claaang
  - florbo 4y ago
    You had to tweak a lot of settings with EAX to make it sound decent, but you could also configure it so you could hear extreme distances, giving you quite the advantage. I bought a Sound Blaster Audigy Gamer card because of that. I had a huge config file that set all sorts of network settings, and even bound PgUp/Dn to cycle through various ex_interp values.. lol
- pprotas 4y ago
  You are the first person I’ve ever seen talk about how a surround sound speaker system is better for competitive shooters than stereo headphones, but I might be showing my age here since you are talking about the 2000’s :P
  - qup 4y ago
    No, I played CS1.6 and I wouldn't consider playing without my headphones. I didn't have a surround sound system because I was a teenager, but I knifed thousands of noobs coming around the corner wall in iceworld because they were too dumb to walk. I'm guessing it was an identical effect to the surround sound, it was basically radar. You could hear people across nearly the whole iceworld map.
- garaetjjte 4y ago
  Surround audio using headphones needs HRTF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-related_transfer_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-related_transfer_function. There is no single profile that works for everyone though, because it is dependent on head and ear shape.
peepee1982 4y ago
Since everybody's headshape and mass is different, it's hard to do binaural audio that works for everyone. Also, I'm pretty sure the brain uses small movements of the head to know where sounds come from. So you'd have to have head tracking with virtually no latency. A bunch of speakers in a circle around you don't have any of these issues.
- teawrecks 4y ago
  The latency issue would be in the timing of samples between the sound drivers, not from the game to the sound port. The sound data could take 50ms+ to make it through the DAC, but as long as it plays the signal to each driver with enough precision relative to the other (and assuming the response of the driver is sufficient), your brain would get the orientation info. The frames you're seeing are already around 50ms late for most games anyway (unless you're playing the game at hundreds of fps, which is very possible with cs1.6), and mouse latency is between 50-100ms. Head tracking wouldn't be necessary because you're always looking straight at the screen and the camera is always aligned with your character's head. You're never going to physically turn your head to get a better angle on a sound source, you'll just turn in game.
  - peepee1982 4y ago
    You're right, but if the head can't move, you'll aquire less spatial information. That's what I was trying to say.
  - ace2358 4y ago
    I’m surprised to hear 50ms for audio processing. I’m a music producer and I can feel it at about 20ms of latency. (Pressing key on keyboard (musical) to hearing sound) I would have thought video games wouldn’t have more latency than audio production software.
    - peepee1982 4y ago
      Since most games don't even let you choose dedicated ASIO drivers for output, I'm not surprised at all. I think 50ms for gaming is okay.

Waterluvian 4y ago

You generally need special headphones for that and they really didn't work that well 20 years ago. I don't recall there being any way to tell the Half Life engine or my sound card "output 6 channels to the headphones" and the engine wouldn't do A3D if it was a stereo device. By having a 5.1 setup surrounding me (about 2 feet away in each direction, it was.. cluttered), the brain produces a surround sound effect the way it does in normal life. An expert would have to speak further about how headphones can emulate that, but I don't recall it ever really being a thing in the early 2000s.

kentonv 4y ago
I have a vivid memory of playing Doom 2 on a 486 in the 90's, hiding in a building with a cyberdemon circling around the outside, and being able to tell exactly where he was based on sound alone. Needless to say Doom produced no more than 2 channels of audio. Interestingly Doom's audio code was licensed from a third party. When they open sourced it, they had to rewrite that part; I think Carmack said he backported Quake's code. I wonder if that third-party code was just really good or something.
- deadbunny 4y ago
  I had the same experience with doom 2; heard an Imp fireballing me directly behind me so perfectly I spun around in my chair.
rzzzt 4y ago
The Sierra version of Half-Life had EAX support, IIRC, with strangely long reverberations each time you walked on something made out of metal. claaang
- florbo 4y ago
  You had to tweak a lot of settings with EAX to make it sound decent, but you could also configure it so you could hear extreme distances, giving you quite the advantage. I bought a Sound Blaster Audigy Gamer card because of that. I had a huge config file that set all sorts of network settings, and even bound PgUp/Dn to cycle through various ex_interp values.. lol
pprotas 4y ago
You are the first person I’ve ever seen talk about how a surround sound speaker system is better for competitive shooters than stereo headphones, but I might be showing my age here since you are talking about the 2000’s :P
- qup 4y ago
  No, I played CS1.6 and I wouldn't consider playing without my headphones. I didn't have a surround sound system because I was a teenager, but I knifed thousands of noobs coming around the corner wall in iceworld because they were too dumb to walk. I'm guessing it was an identical effect to the surround sound, it was basically radar. You could hear people across nearly the whole iceworld map.
garaetjjte 4y ago
Surround audio using headphones needs HRTF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-related_transfer_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-related_transfer_function. There is no single profile that works for everyone though, because it is dependent on head and ear shape.

peepee1982 4y ago

Since everybody's headshape and mass is different, it's hard to do binaural audio that works for everyone. Also, I'm pretty sure the brain uses small movements of the head to know where sounds come from. So you'd have to have head tracking with virtually no latency. A bunch of speakers in a circle around you don't have any of these issues.

teawrecks 4y ago
The latency issue would be in the timing of samples between the sound drivers, not from the game to the sound port. The sound data could take 50ms+ to make it through the DAC, but as long as it plays the signal to each driver with enough precision relative to the other (and assuming the response of the driver is sufficient), your brain would get the orientation info. The frames you're seeing are already around 50ms late for most games anyway (unless you're playing the game at hundreds of fps, which is very possible with cs1.6), and mouse latency is between 50-100ms. Head tracking wouldn't be necessary because you're always looking straight at the screen and the camera is always aligned with your character's head. You're never going to physically turn your head to get a better angle on a sound source, you'll just turn in game.
- peepee1982 4y ago
  You're right, but if the head can't move, you'll aquire less spatial information. That's what I was trying to say.
- ace2358 4y ago
  I’m surprised to hear 50ms for audio processing. I’m a music producer and I can feel it at about 20ms of latency. (Pressing key on keyboard (musical) to hearing sound) I would have thought video games wouldn’t have more latency than audio production software.
  - peepee1982 4y ago
    Since most games don't even let you choose dedicated ASIO drivers for output, I'm not surprised at all. I think 50ms for gaming is okay.