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I was always amused by how many of my friends got crazy monitors but still just used headphones. Surround sound for 1.6 made the game incredibly unfair. Being able to hear specifically in what direction and volume footsteps were coming from was basically a wallhack. I would often use headphones because parents weren't the biggest fans of hours of that a night, and it was so crippling.

Funny enough, my semi-pro career (I made $60 total) ended when I abandoned my surround sound when moving out in undergrad.

sound blaster at some point allowed you to emulate exaggerated "3d sound" polyphony. I distinctly remember a control panel, where you could drag around surround sound speakers and it would attempt to emulate them in headphones.

> but still just used headphones

I haven't thought of Ventrilo/Teamspeak in years...

Ohhhh right that reminded me of another anecdote: sound cancellation wasn't really a working tech back then so my Vent buddies hated hearing my game. I would have a little earbud in connected to Vent on my other computer so I could hear them, but they'd always hear my game, so I ended up developing this half-assed skill of speaking only during quiet times.

Weird. My experience has always been that headphones are more effective at producing precise 3D sound than speakers. And intuitively, it seems like they should, because they can feed each ear with exactly the sound that ear should hear.

That said it does require that the game has good 3D sound generation, which isn't trivial, especially differentiating front and back which requires accounting for the shape of the human ear.

Is this true? I used headphones all throughout my CS days. Stereo sound in headphones was enough to give a competitive advantage.

You generally need special headphones for that and they really didn't work that well 20 years ago. I don't recall there being any way to tell the Half Life engine or my sound card "output 6 channels to the headphones" and the engine wouldn't do A3D if it was a stereo device.

By having a 5.1 setup surrounding me (about 2 feet away in each direction, it was.. cluttered), the brain produces a surround sound effect the way it does in normal life.

An expert would have to speak further about how headphones can emulate that, but I don't recall it ever really being a thing in the early 2000s.

What is a vent

Vent aka. Ventrilo was a group voice chat application from about 20 years ago. You'd log into a server and have different "chat rooms" to be in, and it was voice-centric (and text to speech and many other features).

Ventrillo, a voice chat program popular for gamers. I guess sort of 2002 era Discord.

You only have ~2 ears, there is no need for 5.1 channel surround sound.

Since everybody's headshape and mass is different, it's hard to do binaural audio that works for everyone.

Also, I'm pretty sure the brain uses small movements of the head to know where sounds come from. So you'd have to have head tracking with virtually no latency.

A bunch of speakers in a circle around you don't have any of these issues.

Hearing is more involved than taking sensory input from two sources. If it weren't, there wouldn't be mixing and mastering engineers using speakers. Which they mainly do.

I have a vivid memory of playing Doom 2 on a 486 in the 90's, hiding in a building with a cyberdemon circling around the outside, and being able to tell exactly where he was based on sound alone. Needless to say Doom produced no more than 2 channels of audio.

Interestingly Doom's audio code was licensed from a third party. When they open sourced it, they had to rewrite that part; I think Carmack said he backported Quake's code. I wonder if that third-party code was just really good or something.

We only have ~2 eyes, there is no need for a third dimension!

You already get 99% of that "wallhack" by having stereo headphones. The game is mostly flat.

Pretty sure they use speakers because they are mastering primarily for speaker setups. Not because it increases the accuracy of location information encoded in the sound.

You only need a 2D display to create fully 3d images (see the 3DS for an example).

For casual level play it’s indeed fine. But the “flatness” of a level doesn’t really mean much. You want to know which specific part of a nearby room someone is in. To the left… in front? Behind? Are they going through the hallway or cellar in cs_italy?

Like any game, you get huge value out of slight advantages when you get to the more high level skill.

Did you stop to think for two seconds before posting this? People can tell where a sound is coming from in a 3d space. That’s why you can tell the difference between a sound directly in front of you and directly behind you.

>cs_italy

FYI there are AMA thread from makers of it on Reddit somewhere.

A quite fun read.

You can easily create sound in front of and behind you with headphones.

Surround sound was unnecessary. As long as you had stereo headphones you were fine. I had cheap headphones, expensive headphones and even won headphones at LAN events. Directional audio was never an issue on any headset I'd played with. I tested them all with this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUDTlvagjJA

The only headphone issue I had in my decades of playing CS were with open ear headphones (Sennheiser HD555) that reduced the punchiness of bass and made footsteps more difficult to hear in CSS which was a terrible game with terrible audio.

You can just move the mouse horizontally slightly and you'll know the direction of the sound instantly.

Stereo is not for casual play, it's clearly the opposite as here's not a single professional player that uses surround to my knowledge.

The Sierra version of Half-Life had EAX support, IIRC, with strangely long reverberations each time you walked on something made out of metal. claaang

How many pro CSGO players use surround?

Pro players almost definitely all use headphones, because they're typically on stage for tournaments with their teammates right next to them and their opponents somewhere nearby.

But even when they're not on stage, they're often in the same room with their teammates. And even if that isn't the case for some reason and a player is in their own room, winning those tournaments is generally the highest honor, so pro players would likely want to practice as close to tournament conditions anyways.

Directional audio over headphones is surprisingly good nowadays, though. HRTF is pretty cool stuff.

The latency issue would be in the timing of samples between the sound drivers, not from the game to the sound port. The sound data could take 50ms+ to make it through the DAC, but as long as it plays the signal to each driver with enough precision relative to the other (and assuming the response of the driver is sufficient), your brain would get the orientation info. The frames you're seeing are already around 50ms late for most games anyway (unless you're playing the game at hundreds of fps, which is very possible with cs1.6), and mouse latency is between 50-100ms.

Head tracking wouldn't be necessary because you're always looking straight at the screen and the camera is always aligned with your character's head. You're never going to physically turn your head to get a better angle on a sound source, you'll just turn in game.

I have no problem sondhacking with my 2.1 setup.

And because surround is mostly useless, if not messing up sound. With stereo all you need is to move your mouse horizontally to locate the exact direction of any sound.

Yeah, for sure.

There are other considerations as well - if game sound is coming over loud speakers, you run the risk of it also being picked up by your microphone when you try to communicate with your teammates.

You are the first person I’ve ever seen talk about how a surround sound speaker system is better for competitive shooters than stereo headphones, but I might be showing my age here since you are talking about the 2000’s :P

Accurate positional audio from a stereo source is far from easy.

You had to tweak a lot of settings with EAX to make it sound decent, but you could also configure it so you could hear extreme distances, giving you quite the advantage. I bought a Sound Blaster Audigy Gamer card because of that. I had a huge config file that set all sorts of network settings, and even bound PgUp/Dn to cycle through various ex_interp values.. lol

audio spatialization has gotten really fancy in games. We can trick your eat into thinking sounds are coming from any direction with a combination of filters, delays, attenuations, etc. Of course it's not as good as the real thing but it is still very convincing (and certainly good enough to be competitive in CS these days).

It's even harder with surround setup.

No, I played CS1.6 and I wouldn't consider playing without my headphones.

I didn't have a surround sound system because I was a teenager, but I knifed thousands of noobs coming around the corner wall in iceworld because they were too dumb to walk.

I'm guessing it was an identical effect to the surround sound, it was basically radar. You could hear people across nearly the whole iceworld map.

I’m surprised to hear 50ms for audio processing. I’m a music producer and I can feel it at about 20ms of latency. (Pressing key on keyboard (musical) to hearing sound)

I would have thought video games wouldn’t have more latency than audio production software.

I had the same experience with doom 2; heard an Imp fireballing me directly behind me so perfectly I spun around in my chair.

Like Mumble?

TBH a bunch of speakers seems like it would be much worse.

If you had an infinite matrix of speakers located at every possible point relative to your head, then you could play each sound from the exact speaker representing the correct direction, and get perfect 3D audio. Maybe it would even be sufficient to have a sphere of speakers around you, or even a circle if elevation isn't relevant in most games.

But in practice we don't have any of those. We have 4 or 5 speakers roughly arranged around the player. If one of those 4 or 5 directions happens to be exactly what you need, then great, play the sound from that speaker and you're good. But if not, then what?

The brain decides the direction of sound based primarily on the relative latency between when it is heard in each ear [0]. How do you create a precise time difference when you have 4-5 different speakers each of which can be heard by both ears?

Plus the game doesn't even usually know exactly where the speakers are located relative to the player's head. Exactly how far away are they? Are the front speakers closer than the back?

With headphones, none of this is a problem. The game can precisely control exactly what the person hears, including precisely controlling interaural time difference.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interaural_time_difference

I remember being blindfolded in high school science class and testing this by having someone clap two sticks together around my head. Surprisingly difficult to tell if something is in front or behind you.

Like Discord but with like 10ms latency to your friends in the area and no fancy pancy filters adding group delay when you speak.

Overall a way superior experience to what we have today.

I remember having actual effortless conversations on Ventrilo. Nowadays speaking in Discord or MS Teams or what ever is exhausting since you interrupt each other due to the delay.

Phones have also gotten worse. It would be interesting to see a number of round trip "ping" for different Voip providers and phone systems ...

Surround audio using headphones needs HRTF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-related_transfer_function. There is no single profile that works for everyone though, because it is dependent on head and ear shape.

You meant this as a sarcastic response, but literally all VR headsets are just 2 displays, 1 per eye. The same thing is true about audio & ears. If you've got a speaker that you know is dedicated strictly to a single ear, then all you need is 2 speakers to simulate audio coming from anywhere.

It's called HRTF and it's not at all a new technology. All you actually need is stereo headphones to have 3d positional audio.

My DDR setup -- a Windows gaming PC connected to a pretty standard stereo receiver -- has 70ms total latency between button press and audio. That's more than enough to make the game unplayable, except that of course StepMania lets me configure it to pretend button presses occurred 70ms in the past.

Friend painted dot in the center of his screen with permanent marker for sniper rifles, especially strongest one became 1-off shotgun. We hated him for that

I was around CAL-M level in 1.6 and I never had a surround sound setup, but I'm unconvinced that it has any meaningful benefit over headphones, which worked perfectly fine for intuiting where someone was. That's hardly a real benefit in higher level play, anyway because you know where everyone could be, anyway, and your movement is dictated by that knowledge as well.

I figured this out already with speakers and definitely with headphones.

Give this a go, with headphones https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BltHXngvlk

It wouldn't surprise me in todays market but humans are much more sensitive to audio than visual. That's why in audio production ~10ms is the max tolerable limit IIRC.

You're right, but if the head can't move, you'll aquire less spatial information. That's what I was trying to say.

Since most games don't even let you choose dedicated ASIO drivers for output, I'm not surprised at all. I think 50ms for gaming is okay.

My whole point was that the headphones move with the head, so your brain can't deduct spatial information from head movements.

If I mount your head in a fixture and play a sound, you won't be able to place it in three-dimensional space. Only on a 2D plane.

As soon as I let you move your head, you have a much better chance of guessing where the sound comes from.

Nope. Because headphones don't give you sound pressure fluctuations in your body, and because the depth (not width!) perception is all messed up when using headphones.

Yeah, it's a lot better than without the transfer function. It just doesn't react to my head movements, which speakers do (by staying stationary relative to my head)

Yes, I understood your argument. However, your brain does not primarily use head movement to judge location. It primarily uses interaural time difference. Head movement may have some effect (your brain is a neural network trained to use all signals available to it), but ITD is the main factor, at least for most people.

Moreover, it's not clear that 4 point sources of audio can accurately reproduce real-world effects for the purpose of head movements, either.

Sure, but your screen doesn't move, so your head doesn't move much either.

Positional audio in video games exists and is good. Try playing Rainbow Six: Siege. With the right signal processing you only need 2 sound sources.

Try playing Rainbow Six: Siege. You can accurately shoot people through walls just by listening to their footsteps.