A3D Audio

misterjingo · 4 Oct 2016 at 11:47

Years ago, I used to have an aureal vortex2 sound card. This utilised A3d, and to be blunt, it was amazing.

Sadly, the company who made the technology was bankrupt through a lawsuit with Creative, who saw their technology as a threat.

It seems people are still updating the drivers, so it should work with windows 10. I'm going to buy one of the old a3d cards from eBay and give it ago.

Is there any reason (drivers working and all) that this shouldn't work?

archerz · 4 Oct 2016 at 11:54

If you have the right socket and the drivers to work it should be fine

misterjingo · 4 Oct 2016 at 12:57

The only second hand card I could find was in Russia. I've ordered it and hopefully should get it in the next few weeks!

Rroff · 4 Oct 2016 at 13:02

Saddens me there is no standard API for binaural audio and sound physics modelling - I heard a demo of what Aureal were working on (advanced modelling of surface materials, etc.) shortly before the whole thing with Creative and it was awesome.

misterjingo · 4 Oct 2016 at 14:08

It's crazy that in the past 15 years there has been no commercial 3D audio developments which match the A3D stuff from 2001.

I used to play HLDM competitively, and the A3D gave an advantage as your opponents footsteps could tell you their distance and even height, it was that accurate

.

OldComputerGuy7 · 4 Oct 2016 at 22:36

I do remember A3D it is impressive, IIRC i had a sonicfury card which supported it and i remember much the same thing, you could just know where they were from the noise shame it went away.

Just found this which is meant to allow you to do some of the A3D stuff in win7/8 etc, might be worth checking out.
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=881030

Dicehunter · 5 Oct 2016 at 04:27

I remember sound being such a huge focus and quite a few times a big selling point for games, While the sound in games isn't bad now it seems over the last few years, In my experience, We've completely stalled.

I'd love proper binaural sound options for a stereo or headphone/set setup.

VincentHanna · 5 Oct 2016 at 14:25

I thought Creative rolled this in to EAX 2?

I just use 5.1 Surround sound now anyway.

Rroff · 5 Oct 2016 at 14:32

EAX has much more static/basic versions of the environment functionality, CMSS-3D isn't terrible but far inferior to what Aureal were working on.