Hardware 3DS Sound Output differences?

[zerowalker]

Hi,

it has probably been asked before, the one i found was pretty close but very old so thought it would be a bad idea to write there.

So here's the question.

I was looking at Citra and notices there's 3 different modes of sound output, which i guess is the output that you setup on the hardware itself somewhere (i own one, but never really used it;p).

Now Mono and Stereo are most likely obvious, i am guessing Mono simply takes the Stereo (two channels) and merge them, as that's the common way as far as i know.

The one i care about it Surround, what does it even do, cause the hardware as far as i know only have 2 output channels, so even if you have 100 channels internally, you have to merge them to stereo,
which is usually what games does anyway, as there's not just 2 channels when it's processing (depends though).

Is it simply trying to make some voodoo magic and try making it sound more "surroundish"?
Or is there actually something real going on there?

Personally i prefer when you do less processing on the audio, i like to simply playback what you get from the source. (I know it's a bit vague at times what that even means though).

So please help me out understanding what's going on here!

 

[Rahkeesh]

It has a virtual surround effect that is optimized for its speakers, trying to mimic how your ears muffle sound from the back which is part of how you localize sound. Some games will use it for positional audio, but it can interfere with the clarity of stereo things like music. So yeah, voodoo magic. Personally I just use Stereo.

 

[jamezfat]

Think about it this way; you as a human being, for the most part only have 2 audio inputs.

So how is one able to distinguish if a sound is in front or behind them?

As best stated above; voodoo magic.

In all seriousness though , the ears are some weird pieces of tech, and aren't too easy to interface with all of the time.
So games that pull off surround sound with only those 2 speakers are doing so by effectively emulating how your ears would effect sounds coming from behind you.

They don't always do a super good job though. And it more or less requires you to be the right distance and angle from the two speakers.

(Some games have a headphones mode, which essentially accommodates for the speakers being ON your ears as opposed to about a foot and a half away)


(Also, if nintendo could release some ear tracking surround sound, that'd be awesome)


Its generally ends up being easier to just slap the extra sound outputs behind you and let your ears do the fancy sound source locating stuff, instead of trying to trick them.

I use surround sound most of the time, as I think its pretty neat. But I know some people find its inconsistencies annoying.


And to end this little ramble I'll leave you with a bit of an urban legend about the design of the original DS (the big ugly phat one)

Some people say that the strange curvature of the top half of the device is actually supposed to aid surround sound enabled games.
And that early games like Mario 64 DS had their surround sound tweaked to have these tilted speakers in mind.

And I don't know if its me just being crazy, but I honestly think that that game's surround sound sounds best on the phat DS.

Who knows, maybe the legend is true...


Ok, I've rambled on long enough lol

(Ps the new 2DSXL kills the surround sound for any of these games because the speakers are on the bottom corners and constantly muffled by your hands...)