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That's interesting about DH emphasizing bass, where CMSS emphasizing treble.
So dolby headphone only has access to the 5.1 dolby digital information from games, but CMSS gets the information from somewhere else (directsound3D?) And Rapture3D gets information from OpenAL, but I guess that's not common or standardized?
Do console games have any standardized audio positioning information besides Dolby Digital, and DTS? Is there more advanced audio positioning information just not being used? Is that a licensing thing or just no ones bothered to implement a more advanced standard than the 5.1 dolby digital information on consoles?
Consoles were pretty much stuck on stereo with the occasional matrixed Dolby Surround/Pro Logic two-channel surround for years until 6th-generation consoles started packing S/PDIF outputs and Dolby Digital, while PCs had a 3D audio revolution in the late 1990s sparked by Aureal and Creative. (To this day, you'll still have people saying that Aureal's A3D 2.0 with its wavetracing and whatnot sounds better than Creative's EAX 5.0.)
To make this possible, Microsoft introduced the DirectSound3D API in DirectX, which basically tells the sound card driver where the in-game sounds are in 3D space, and lets the sound card decide where and how to play back those sounds. OpenAL, a later-introduced API, works similarly. The game engine does NOT pre-mix the sounds like XAudio2 + X3DAudio and FMOD Ex do, because that's not the game engine's job in the first place.
Aureal took advantage of this with A3D, and their headphone mode on Vortex chipset-based cards wowed people with what must have actually been binaural audio, given how they mentioned that they could pinpoint sounds in Half-Life with nothing but headphones, even above and below! I have reason to believe that Creative uses as much acquired Aureal tech as Sensaura tech in the HRTF field to make CMSS-3D Headphone.
Rapture3D works similarly, but completely in software as opposed to a sound card DSP. After all, it has the same access to the 3D positional sound information OpenAL provides that CMSS-3D Headphone does. The problem is that OpenAL, while a good API, never had the prevalence of DirectSound3D due to how soon it got displaced by XAudio2 + X3DAudio and FMOD Ex, starting around 2007. (PC game audio has really taken a turn for the worse over these past 5 years.) It would be an easier sell if it had a DirectSound3D-to-OpenAL wrapper included, like Creative ALchemy, Asus DS3DGX/C-Media Xear3D, Realtek 3DSoundBack, or so forth, and as a bonus, you don't need a Creative card to get the most out of it.
By contrast, consoles always had software-mixed audio (maybe unless you're counting the really old stuff that falls into "chiptune" category, or 5th/6th-gen consoles like the Saturn and Dreamcast with dedicated audio processors), and they're designed with home theater speaker systems in mind, not headphones. That's why I haven't seen a single console game really offer a binaural audio option for headphone users, instead having to rely on virtualized 5.1 from a real-time-encoded Dolby Digital or DTS stream...and that's if the game in question supports either of those. Whatever the case, they're clearly designed with a different mindset from the days when every gaming PC worth its price had a good sound card, no exceptions.
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I guess I'm in a very small third camp where you can enjoy both DH and CMSS-3D. DH on my console/Mixamp setup and CMSS-3D on my PC/Titanium HD setup.
I'm also part of this third camp, believe it or not. I don't hate Dolby Headphone or anything-it's great at what it does-but I do feel that PC games capable of providing true 3D positional audio and not some arbitrary 7.1 arrangement of speakers are something DH could take advantage of, but doesn't in its current implementation. Not that I expect Dolby Labs to bother when they're the ones pushing 5.1 and 7.1 so hard to begin with, and the days of true 3D sound in PC games are largely over.
Still, I'm not giving up my JVC/Victor SU-DH1 given how useful it is for console gaming, even with Pro Logic II sources instead of Dolby Digital or DTS. (Has anyone here ever played Metroid Prime with DH on? It's surprisingly good for something without discrete surround channels.)