Half-Life: Aureal A3D 2.0 vs MetaAudio HRTF audio mod 🎧 (3D spatial sound + EAX)

Channel:

I Drink Lava - 3D Game Audio

Subscribers:

2,140

Published on November 7, 2018 11:00:16 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR2abojkuow

Game:

Half-Life (1998)

Duration: 9:44

8,492 views

141

Use headphones only with any virtual surround features turned off. Best HRTF comparison at 5:01 (Barney shooting Headcrab Zombie).

Half-Life is nearly 20 years old. In those two decades, it has seen the release of dozens of mods, several successful multiplayer mods that went commerical, a terrible Source engine port, a migration to the Steampipe system, a handful of reverse-engineered source ports, a series of videos on its well-kept secrets, and a proper high-quality remake by dedicated fans. Just a year and a half after its original release, however, fans saw the death of what was arguably Half-Life's greatest feature: Aureal A3D 2.0. Using a combination of Head-Related Transfer Functions (you might recognize this as what CSGO uses today) and real-time "wavetracing" for realistic occlusion, sound propagation, and up to 60 hardware channels of reverb, A3D brought Half-Life's audio quality to a much higher standard than any Valve title released afterwards.

I've wanted to make this comparison video for a long time, but the exorbitant costs of building a Windows 98 rig with an Aureal Vortex 2 card (up to $120 by itself) along with a capture card to record it has kept me from doing so. Fortunately, I had help in making this video. I want to give a big shout-out to PhilsComputerLab for giving me permission to use his excellent Half-Life Aureal A3D demonstration footage.
https://www.youtube.com/user/philscomputerlab

As much as it pains me to say this, the Aureal A3D functionality in Half-Life is surprisingly poor compared to in other games like Unreal. The MetaAudio mod for Steam HL1 outclasses it in nearly every way. The main problem is that the sound quality is muffled due to an unknown glitch with most Vortex 2 drivers. Honestly, the binaural audio doesn't sound that much better than CMSS-3D, but that could just be the fault of the muffled audio. The real-time reverb and occlusion are also overhyped, though it's a known fact that no game ever truly took advantage of Aureal's reverb due to the difficulty of programming it in. There's even bugs with the sound rolloff which I've demonstrated previously on this channel.

Still, in that short time before Creative bought out Aureal and Windows 2000 came out, nothing could beat Aureal A3D 2.0 in Half-Life. It took nearly 20 years before someone could make their own alternative.


MetaAudio footage Settings:
Windows Control Panel: Stereo
Sound Quality: High
al_doppler "0.3" (IMPORTANT: MetaAudio has a similar exaggerated Doppler problem to Yamagi Quake II. LAGonauta recommends this setting.)
(in alsoft.ini located in %APPDATA%)
channels=stereo
frequency=44100
stereo-mode=headphones
cf_level=0
sample-type=float32
periods=3
period_size=128
default-hrtf=Built-In 44100
hrtf=true
resampler=cubic
drivers="-dsound,"

Links:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAOcdfCN-RU
https://github.com/LAGonauta/MetaAudio/releases
https://steamcommunity.com/app/70/discussions/0/828934913113943429

Credits:
Lightless Dawn Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
(Trimmed for time.)

http://www.3dgw.com/hardware/soundcards/msmx300/card-big.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b2/Aureal_A3D_(logo).png
(Credit to Swaaye. Use of these images fall under fair use laws.



#3dsound #spatialaudio #binaural #3daudio #360audio #8daudio #hrtf #headphones #audiophile #gameaudio #mod #retrogaming #eax #retro #halflife #a3d
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