Creative Launches Sound Blaster Katana SE Sound Bar that Doesn't Need a Sub-woofer

[olymind1]

I remember the story as MS pulled 3D sound as whatever Creative was selling was the cause of "most" of the W(7? maybe 8) crashes. I'm still rocking an Audigy 2ZS and 7.1 speakers (also Creative). Positional audio was so much better than this current home theatre crap. But...


A 10s scan of that tells me there was some truth there. 3D audio was a thing and better than now, esp. in games. Creative blew it and MS wiped it to replace with surround sound. We lost something that could have been awesome, but maybe needed more work.

At least that is about to change, nowdays more and more games start to use RT as acceleration for calculating 3D audio.

 

[kanecvr]

Hmm, 3 inches is not going to cut it.

That's what she said.

(sorry, couldn't help myself)

Mmmhhmm... Maybe you should get your knowledge from something else than reddit rants.
I'm not here to educate you kid.

He is right you know. Back in the day there were many 3d / positional audio APIs apart from the ones supported by Creative, most famous of witch (at least in my generation) was A3D from Aureal, used in their Vortex line of sound cards. Yamaha also supported Aureal's A3D as well as Creative's EAX with their DS-XG line of sound cards (YMF-724/744). Crystal also had some 3d audio API, quite an early one too, supported by their older ISA sound cards as well as newer PCI ones, although I'm not sure if it was backed up by hardware like A3D or just a piece of software that provided 3d functionality. I think it was called C3D or CR3D or something along those lines. OpenAL is an open-source software 3D audio that is supported by most sound cards. Earliest game to use OpenAL that I can remember is Dungeon Keeper 2.

Personally I've always seen 3d audio and multi speaker setups as a gimmicky, and although it was supported by my first and second (ever) soundcards, I was not impressed when I enabled it - by either A3D or EAX.