From jbisdale@gte.net Mon Jun 14 16:48:44 1999 Received: from burdell.cc.gatech.edu (root@burdell.cc.gatech.edu [130.207.3.207]) by lennon.cc.gatech.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) with ESMTP id QAA07095 for ; Mon, 14 Jun 1999 16:48:44 -0400 (EDT) Received: from asbestos.hitl.washington.edu (hitl-new.hitl.washington.edu [128.95.73.60]) by burdell.cc.gatech.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) with ESMTP id QAA12832; Mon, 14 Jun 1999 16:48:40 -0400 (EDT) Received: from mail1.gte.net (mail1.gte.net [207.115.153.32]) by asbestos.hitl.washington.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id NAA07148 for <3d-ui@hitl.washington.edu>; Mon, 14 Jun 1999 13:48:20 -0700 (PDT) Received: from isdale.gte.net (calnet17-206.gtecablemodem.com [207.175.240.206]) by mail1.gte.net with SMTP ; id PAA10558 Mon, 14 Jun 1999 15:45:53 -0500 (CDT) Message-Id: <3.0.5.32.19990614134237.008d0410@mail.gte.net> X-Sender: jbisdale@mail.gte.net X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 3.0.5 (32) Date: Mon, 14 Jun 1999 13:42:37 -0700 To: "Anders Backman" , <3d-ui@hitl.washington.edu> From: Jerry Isdale Subject: RE: Spatial Sound In-Reply-To: <000201beb627$f2a65780$ca29ef82@mickey.cs.umu.se> References: <4FD6422BE942D111908D00805F3158DF0D954465@RED-MSG-52> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Status: RO Some good pointers there from the others. I happen to be checking out 3d audio for HRL lately (and did a quick review for June VR News). I missed some of the research links but here's some of the wisdom I've acquired so far... *) PC (Windoze) based Audio has the most support and is fairly cheap - a good 3d hardware board is $100-200. *) Main Commericial PC APIs are: Aureal A3D QSound Soundblaster EAX Miles Sound/RSX QSound is free and non-proprietary. Some of there technology has been migrating into DirectX. The resource management stuff in particular is important for complex dynamic worlds. Having the ability to scale back from 3D+HW to straight stereo is very nice. Some other RM managers simply drop sounds if there is not enough hw/sw support. EAX and A3D are proprietary to their own hardware. Some features *might* work on other boards but sometimes not. A3D has more 'reflection' polygon stuff, especially in their hardware support. EAX has more reverb and environmental effects (air density, etc.) All of these build on Microsoft Direct X. The V7 stuff just came out at WinHEC and it looks good. They are adding some better algorithms, etc. It'll be out for developers later this summer (or so). Miles Sound sits on top of all the other APIs and is the recommended top end commercial API. But it is not cheap - $3000/title or $9000 for site (i think). Creative Labs Soundblaster Live has a developer's deal that is really nice - for about $190 you get a Live board, the API disks/docs, and a 4 way speaker system. Thats less than the retail price on the board! As for hardware recommendations - (get some, doing it in SW is too slow) Aureal 3D in a Diamond Monster is very nice. Creative's SoundBlaster Live is also very good. One caveat is you cannot put multiple boards of the same vendor in a Win box. If you need lots of channels, use one Diamond card and one SoundBlaster card. Headphone and speaker systems require differnent algorithms, etc. Speaker systems need to have cross-talk cancelation, etc. U.SoCal's Immersive Audio Lab (http://tchaikovsky.usc.edu/) has some interesting multi-speaker work in development. Their local incubator is/was hosting Tomlinson Holman's company. (think THX). ============= Jerry Isdale email: isdale@acm.org web: http://isdale.com/jerry fax: 805 496 8547