You can hear the pirates in the distance

[andrewducker]

Comments

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Is that a volume control on the GameBlaster? Retro!

Interesting, but would have been much more effective to crossfade the tracks.

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

Has computing audio really not moved on in the last 15 years? I know it's all about the graphics card these days, but surely there must have been some developments - although now I think about it, nothing springs to mind - and I've still got an SB16 in the back of one of my PCs precisely because it has the combined Joystick/MIDI port that hooks into to my old DX7. Can't use the synth with any of this new-fangled rubbish that doesn't have MIDI ports.

(Yes, there probably is a MIDI-USB converter out there somewhere but that's beside the point :)

[andrewducker]

Julie has a USB->MIDI cable converter.

And once audio hit CD quality, where were they going to go with it?

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

Well the sound quality may not have changed much, but the tech has. "Soundcards" are tiny these days in terms of onboard audio devices. The biggest thing's the headphone socket! "1994-Present" doesn't really do the tech justice.

[andrewducker]

True, they are absolutely tiny nowadays. Just part of the motherboard for 99% of people, I suspect.

[spacelem.livejournal.com]

I have two soundcards - the Sound Blaster Audigy I bought ~8 years ago, and the onboard sound that is on my motherboard. The onboard sound has digital out, and twice as many channels, and yet it sounds terrible, and has weird problems like a very small hiss when I move the mouse. Obviously I still don't trust onboard sound.

[lpetrazickis.livejournal.com]

You can get 5+subwoofer and 7+subwoofer speaker setups.

In terms of software, games have directional audio so that the sound changes depending how far you are form the in-game source and where you are facing.

[pete stevens (from livejournal.com)]

In my experience OSX is the only platform that can reliably output 5.1 over digital without losing a bit and pissing off my surround decoder. Both Windows and Linux fail in different ways, with Windows adding insult to injury that 5.1 output is normally a pay for upgrade in most dvd playing software, whereas the downmix + compress for laptops is included. I have attempted to explain to my computer that I'd like it to take the bits off the DVD and put them out of the soundcard without changing them please, but my Mac is the only one that does this perfectly.

I first encountered this problem in 1999. I'm still having it. Very little has advanced in the last 14 years.