Technical investigation into PS4 and XB1 audio solutions *spawn

I was thinking I'm getting old with that YouTube video....funny how I can 21 louder than 20, heard nothing on 22, not sure if my ambient is too loud or the speaker is not good enough.
 
Watching Sony's "Inside PlayStation 4: Building the Best Place to Play" at the APU13 event, and Dominic Mallinson just mentioned the audio chip in PS4 is based on TrueAudio technology...no details though...yet.

Edit: Well, it's over now. He "ran out of time," so kinda stopped abruptly haha. So nothing we didn't know before disclosed except perhaps the TrueAudio bit. :(
 
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I think it should be available on demand soon on their website. Not worth a watch IMO.

You can register here for free to watch and/or check out other presentations/slides.
 
In that scenario it is doing the downmixing not the console, What I hope is that even if you select the 2.0 output setting from the console dash the XB1 and PS4 will offer a HRTF style downmix of the native surround mix. It was quite annoying on my PC when badly ported console titles would simply drop entire channels when I selected headphone output.
Finally got around testing the audio, and I set the console at Stereo, the TV at Stereo too. The positional audio is still there, which is good. But it's only there because I think Skyrim has positional audio by default.


I also tested the sound in Noel Vermillion's ending, and there was a sound effect in particular which sounded only in my right ear. I thought it would be a surround effect but it's not. It works in Stereo too.

The audio on Xbox One is probably going to be unmatched this next generation, imho.

That reminds me... if bkilian :smile: could help me on this, I would be very grateful. I mean, til I purchase a proper 7.1 system I am stuck with the rather decent Stereo from my TV.

I am torn between choosing Uncompressed Stereo or 7.1 Uncompressed. Which would you choose, bkilian? Just curious...

I think I can do fine but I am confused and any help would be appreciated. It has been a few weeks since I bought a new TV but not a 7.1 surround system, not yet. Then again, I have long since run out of ideas.
 
The audio on Xbox One is probably going to be unmatched this next generation, imho.

Don't speak too soon, it sounds like the PS4 may actually be packing TrueAudio now. If true then I'd assume that puts them roughly even??

I'm sure the sound engineers around here can give more details on that though.
 
Don't speak too soon, it sounds like the PS4 may actually be packing TrueAudio now. If true then I'd assume that puts them roughly even??

I'm sure the sound engineers around here can give more details on that though.
I wrote this after reading the PS4's hardware article at Eurogamer. I watched a Youtube video on TrueAudio, and they mostly mentioned convolution as a way to obtain reverberation, and that was it.

Maybe it is a superior technology, maybe not, but Sony have been candid about the audio on PS4, and they didn't say much. This gave me a feeling of PS4's audio chip as being silicon furniture, as if it didn't exist. Because they mentioned pretty much all the other numbers, and seemed proud of them.
 
I wrote this after reading the PS4's hardware article at Eurogamer. I watched a Youtube video on TrueAudio, and they mostly mentioned convolution as a way to obtain reverberation, and that was it.

It's a fully programmable audio DSP (3 of them in fact) which as I understand it is something the XBO lacks (at least in as much as it's not exposed to developers). It can be used for convolutuon reverb, positional audio (including elevation) and, just about any other audio effects developers decide to programme on it, all without impacting the CPU.

Maybe it is a superior technology, maybe not, but Sony have been candid about the audio on PS4, and they didn't say much. This gave me a feeling of PS4's audio chip as being silicon furniture, as if it didn't exist. Because they mentioned pretty much all the other numbers, and seemed proud of them.

This is what made me initially think it didn't have it and what still makes me dubious as to whether it's the full implementation. It looks like we'll find out for sure pretty soon though!
 
It's a fully programmable audio DSP (3 of them in fact) which as I understand it is something the XBO lacks (at least in as much as it's not exposed to developers). It can be used for convolutuon reverb, positional audio (including elevation) and, just about any other audio effects developers decide to programme on it, all without impacting the CPU.



This is what made me initially think it didn't have it and what still makes me dubious as to whether it's the full implementation. It looks like we'll find out for sure pretty soon though!
Judging by the news messyman posted that's going to be interesting.

If the audio chip of the PS4 can do all of that then it is better than people imagined, for 3D sound especially.

Xbox One wouldn't have anything like that, except if -as bkilian asked- Microsoft freed all the DSPs in the audio core for the developers to use.
 
...but the MS engineers told Panello that Xbox has a better sound chip. :oops:

It is one processor on PS4 though? I'd guess it's not quite the same.
 
Doesn't the Xbox One audio processor feature 8 DSPs?

I don't know the full details, I'm sure someone else can explain them better but while it may have 8 cores, I don't think it has 8 programmable DSP's so it's not comparable on that basis.
 
Finally got around testing the audio, and I set the console at Stereo, the TV at Stereo too. The positional audio is still there, which is good. But it's only there because I think Skyrim has positional audio by default.

I also tested the sound in Noel Vermillion's ending, and there was a sound effect in particular which sounded only in my right ear. I thought it would be a surround effect but it's not. It works in Stereo too.

The audio on Xbox One is probably going to be unmatched this next generation, imho.

That reminds me... if bkilian :smile: could help me on this, I would be very grateful. I mean, til I purchase a proper 7.1 system I am stuck with the rather decent Stereo from my TV.

I am torn between choosing Uncompressed Stereo or 7.1 Uncompressed. Which would you choose, bkilian? Just curious...

I think I can do fine but I am confused and any help would be appreciated. It has been a few weeks since I bought a new TV but not a 7.1 surround system, not yet. Then again, I have long since run out of ideas.
Depends on where you want the mixing to happen. I'd say the console might do a better job of mixing to stereo than the TV, since it has more information. Might also be slightly better latency wise. In general, just listen to both, and choose whichever one works best for your setup.
 
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