Sound Advancements

There have been many advancements in
PC audio in the last few years, and in order to be well-educated in
the area, you must be familiar with it. Two of these latest
advancements are the move to DirectX and the move beyond Stereo.

Game-players know that for the
longest time, the latest and best games were written for the DOS
environment. At time it could be a real pain to run these games under
Windows 95. But, there is a reason these games were written for DOS.
With DOS, the software developer was allowed low-level, direct access
the the multimedia components of the system. This allowed them to mix
multiple .WAV files among other things. All the developer had to do
was request the API from the hardware manufacturer and then write the
software to use the low-level functions of the API.

But, Windows threw in an extra via
and made the process much more complex. This is the reason many
developers chose to stick with DOS. The standard Windows Multimedia
API would allow access to the hardware, but not directly. Developers
were limited to whatever Windows allowed. One of the prime limitations
was that the Windows API would not allow the mixing of .WAV files, so
one sound would clip out another.

Enter DirectX. DirectX was written by
Microsoft to allow low-level control of the hardware and allow high
performance multimedia within Windows instead of DOS. DirectX 5.0, for
example, allows low-level control of audio files, giving the ability
to mix multiple .WAV files, as well as control the balance, volume,
and playback rate of each.

DirectX API’s are divided into
sections, each section controls a different function. We have
DirectDraw, DirectSound, DirectSound3D, DirectPlay, etc. DirectSound
is what allows the low-level control of the sound equipment in the PC.
DirectSound3D allows 3-D sound capabilities from only two speakers,
giving rise to positional audio, discussed below.

One of the other advancements in
sound card technology is the move past stereo. Stereo is great for mimicking
a sound stage, where the sound comes from in front of you.
But, stereo cannot recreate the true nature of sound, where it comes
from all around you. Many sound card companies have learned to create
sound algorithms that modify stereo sounds so that they appear to be
coming from all around, even though only two speakers are being used.
Positional Audio is the extreme case of this, where sounds can come
from all around, even above, below, or behind you. This is the best
setup for true gaming.