Technical investigation into PS4 and XB1 audio solutions *spawn

I doubt we'll get in-depth audio coverage. Again, we already had a few games on PS3 with uncompressed lossless audio, but at best, DF would just mention it. 90%+ of gamers won't notice the difference between lossless and lossy audio anyway... the differences are best heard with expensive audio equipment that most gamers don't have. Even some HT enthusiasts can't tell the difference on Blu-Rays. The thing that I'm hoping for is that games will have better audio effects. Even games like Battlefield and The Last of Us had excellent audio... I hope that becomes the standard.

 

If those are the actual descriptors for the audio options, seems they are really misleading as to what actually comes out of the HDMI/Optical.

 

I also miss 3D sound from the original Xbox days, but then it all was gone with the Xbox 360 and its rather above average but not-incredible-at-all sound processed via the CPU. Sigh.

Yes, now that you mention it Incredible Surround 3D seems to implement some kind of HRTF feature.

As I said, if I set the console to Stereo and if, for instance, I am facing someone who is talking in Skyrim, if I am just in front of them their words sound neutrally centred.

If I then use the right stick to look towards my right side, leaving them placed at the left side of my body, all the sound goes to the left ear of my character -that's to say, the words they are speaking sound in the left speaker of the TV-.

On the contrary, if my character faces left, leaving the people speaking at the right side of his body, the NPC voices go to the right speaker of the TV, which feels realistic as they are talking towards the right ear of my character.

If I set the console to Dolby Surround 5.1 or Dolby with WMA Pro -this is the setting I use when I choose surround- then the same happens but as I said people behind me sounds really, really close, but if I turn around -still in place, without moving from where I am- facing them then they sound far.

This means that the Incredible Surround 3D setting of the TV could feature HRTF -in this case trying to imitate the behaviour of a surround system-.

However, as you pointed out already, the sound can get muddy.

This only happens when the Xbox 360 is set to surround 5.1 or Dolby with WMA Pro, because in trying to mix the different sounds from all the channels at times either the sounds of the characters sound behind the harmony of the music or the music sounds behind the voices of the characters.

This is pretty understandable though. I shall experiment, like you say, when I have the Xbox One. I am leaning towards Stereo uncompressed and 7.1 uncompressed.

The "most surround sound like" experience I ever got from the TV and the Xbox 360 happened while playing Blazblue: Calamity Trigger, when I completed the game with Noel Vermillion.

The ending features a bed, all looks white and there was a high frequency *bip* -similar to one of those hospital machines you can see in movies- coming from some place within the room.

The sound only went straight to my right ear, it was A-mazing. It always goes like that because I can play that sequence whenever I want since I have finished the game.

Since it is a high frequency sound it is plenty irritating, but this made me realise that I was still getting a differenced sound from each speaker.

I hope so, too. Richard and the rest of Digital Foundry staff would have to create audio-graphical focused articles, and I think it would be worthwhile.

PS4 is going to feature sound through GPGPU in the future and Xbox One has SHAPE and the rest of the audio block.

Lacking an audio section in future articles would be a missed opportunity for the most complete coverage of future games, imho.

It's not 1980 and we are not using chrome cassettes anymore....

Thanks goodness, I still have a pretty sensitive hearing -long story-, sometimes too sensitive, and I can discern/separate sounds pretty well.

I also watched this brief National Geographic video the other day and testing my hearing I only missed the last two frequency sounds.

Congratulations to those who can hear all the high frequency sounds.

 

I could barely listen to 18000

 

I would be fascinated to know if your tv can handle mixing uncompressed audio, roll on next gen!

Oh and I stopped hearing anything at 16,000 hz, damn I'm getting old at least I can save a few quid by not worrying about high end response on my speakers!

 

make sure the volume is high enough

 

You know you're effectively telling everybody your age range by saying what Hz you can still hear right?

 

I'm going to re-test first thing when I get back home, 16000 hz was lost for me too, that said this was through a built-inspeaker INSIDE the desktop computer and in a noisy environment. (And I don't think any sort of lossy compression would do this test good.)

That said, this is not the best way to test, there's an amount to how many decibels are lost, so you can only understand whether you completely lost those frequencies at the output that your speaker provides. Hearing tests are done using controlled amplitude sounds at specific decibels.

 

Make sure to switch to HD. The low bitrate Youtube streams typically quantizes audio above 16KHz into oblivion.

Cheers

 

I manage to hear the 18000Hz, though the volume was really low which meas it is a goner for me in near future. I had to double check and pump the volume higher so I was sure not to be confused by the back ground noise of my headset.
I think the kids should be able to listen higher pitches.

 

I wasn't entirely convinced by that video as I'd recently had a hearing test that placed me very strong (for my age) yet the 16kHz on that video on first watch was pretty much silent. So I routed audio through my high quality USB audio interface and created a tone in Audacity. 16 kHz is definitely audible, though it has a dramatic drop-off with volume. 18 kHz wasn't audible until I switched from my decent bassy Sennheiser cans to some cheap, in-ear mobile phones and cranked the volume right up. But it's just a squeak, and there's no different in perceived pitch between the higher frequencies - it sounds the same, just quieter.

You read about adults losing sensitivity, but let's be honest here - all we're losing are indiscernible tones and whines. They don't contribute anything of value to the audio spectrum, so we have the sense to outgrow them. Heck, it's probably necessary to help ignore the whining of those kids pestering us for stuff.

 

I wish that was true. Unfortunately it isn't.

 

Yeah. If anything it seems to become more acute!! Especially if it's about Skylanders!

 

If Nintendo made a Pokémon game that worked like Skylanders and Disney Infinity, they'd have another endless gold mine to plumb. And parents would have another endless stream of kid's wanting and whining.

Sorry for the side-tracking. I'm done.

 

Like Shifty I could barely hear the 16,000hz, so I dismissed it and said that the last two tones weren't audible. 16000hz is, just barely. 18000hz is a no go.

I was born short-sighted -genetics- and my sense of smell is not what it should, but my best sense is probably my hearing so I am pretty sensitive to sounds.

The Xbox 360 is so loud to me, even when a disc isn't spinning in the disc drive and I always throttle my laptop to 1.4GHz -it can go up to 3.1GHz- to avoid unnecessary sound from the fan.

I hope that the reports saying the Xbox One is a silent console are true.

The speakers are pretty average, it is a TV after all. Shouldn't the console process all the audio and not the TV?

I mean... the console process all the audio and sends an uncompressed -when the game features uncompressed sound- signal to the TV, which just has to process the 48KHz input from the console, right?

 

I had to switch the video to 720p to be able to hear the 16kHz tone. It was quiet, but I could hear it at a normal volume. 18kHz was completely silent to me. Maybe if I cranked up the volume I could hear it, but it was effectively silent.

I'm surprised I heard the 16kHz tone, because I've gone to hundreds and hundreds of small concerts with the volume jacked, clipping monitors ... just brutal noise and I never wore earplugs. I'm being a lot more conscious about that kind of thing now.

 

I performed better here:
http://www.noiseaddicts.com/2009/03/can-you-hear-this-hearing-test/

The sound level seemed to go down after 17Khz, I hear up to 20Khz. This seems to be a better test, even the HD video on youtube is subjected to compression.

I don't think hearing very high frequencies doesn't add to the listening experience. Sounds have a mixture of frequencies in them and hearing more frequencies should provide a richer experience. But you really don't know if it is richer as you can't compare it to when you lose it, and you lose it so slowly that you get accustomed to it, it is the new normal. A bit like how people lose the ability to smell certain things.

 

Sorry what I meant was if you feed your TV the 7.1 uncompressed signal via HDMI and it uses it's HRTF mode to produce surround sound from the 2.0 speakers. 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.

 

I am going to test it out and see if that's either a thing of the TV that it tries to imitate the surround effects by moving the sound around or it has to do with how games process the sound.

The idea is to set the sound of the TV to Stereo while the Xbox 360 outputs 5.1 sound and then running the same test setting the console to Stereo too. It shouldn't take more than 5 minutes.

Didn't those PC games have a Stereo option? I mean, I prefer sound quality to sound quantity. I'd rather set the Xbox One to uncompressed Stereo if it provides the better experience taking into account the sound will be coming from two speakers than 5.1 or 7.1 and the TV does the downmixing without keeping the actual sound quality intact.

When it comes to sound I want it in its purest form.

Tried again, 16000Hz is my limit, hesido. Thanks for the link.

 

I experienced the same as you. I can hear normally up to 16 and the tones get progressively higher. Then 17 and 18 get lower in tone but I hear them clearly. Weirdly I then hear nothing at all at 19 but I can hear 20 and the tone is identical to 18! After 20 I hear nothing.