Rough figures for mono, stereo and surround sound?

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rainwarrior
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Re: Rough figures for mono, stereo and surround sound?

Post by rainwarrior »

Since most games avoid hard panning in only one channel anyway, often playing a "stereo" game in mono via only one of the channels just results in some of the audio channels being a little quiet. Certainly not ideal, but I think games could get away with not having a mono option.
93143 wrote: Sun Jul 24, 2022 7:14 pm
rainwarrior wrote: Sat Jul 23, 2022 1:03 pm(Dolby surround) works very poorly for music.
Vortex might disagree with you...
Well, specifically I think the crosstalk and delay tends to make music come out with less clarity. I think sound effects benefit from the rear spatial effect in a way that music mostly doesn't.

However, I'm sure many people prefer how some music sounds through pro-logic decoding. Often even if it wasn't intended for that form... it was kinda advertised as a thing that would "add" surround to your existing stuff. I think most people who had a home theatre with this option would just turn it on and leave it on, they wouldn't check which VHS tapes had the dolby logo and only use it for those.

My personal feeling is that if the music was composed for stereo and pro-logic decoding is imposed on it after the fact, you're losing something in the crosstalk. But... I dunno, it's not terrible. It's basically a little bit of "echo". It's like if you brought your radio into the shower, and you liked the way it sounded in there. Maybe it does sound good, but it's definitely not the sound it was written for. If you give me the choice, I'd rather listen to the music in its original stereo form.

I don't wanna say that there's only one way to play a game. Obviously these things were made to be played on a variety of home setups. Not something I can prove, but I suspect most of the SNES games with dolby surround support were primarily made with stereo in mind. People did/do have surround sound in their homes, but it's always been a minority. My feeling is that this stuff was made in stereo, and still sounded OK with pro-logic going on. The effect is certainly subtle enough to not normally be a big problem either way.


Looking at Vortex and its music. It looks like when you set it to stereo mode, they universally have the right echo channel inverted, sending all echoes to the rear. That seems to be the entirety of the effect on the music. All of the music has lots of echo with stereo panning. Clearly they tried to make something that would enhance the spatial effect of pro-logic surround. On a regular stereo system the echo would probably have some spatially-sensitive destructive interference, but given what they were going for was mostly just a full and bubbly stereo field of echoes, that shouldn't be too bad of an effect?


I also looked at Seiken Denestsu 3, and interestingly it has options for mono, stereo, and wide-stereo. The wide version appears to just globally invert the left channel and nothing else! Quite a strange effect... You definitely wouldn't want this by default, because it could cause centre channels to drop entirely on mono systems. To set the "wide" version on most stereo speaker setups is probably less than ideal (destructive interference), but on headphones it gives a different "inside the head" spatial effect. Does SD3-wide actually sound any good on dolby? I feel like what it's doing would send far too much of the sound to the rear? (I almost wish I still had my old surround system that had pro-logic to test with now, but I got rid of it years ago.)

Secret of Mana was also on some lists, but I don't see why? It doesn't have any audio settings in the game, and I didn't catch it using inverted audio at all. It doesn't have a dolby logo on the box, either.
creaothceann
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Re: Rough figures for mono, stereo and surround sound?

Post by creaothceann »

Do Star Ocean and/or Tales of Phantasia have surround sound enabled by default? They always sounded a bit different to me.

EDIT: This answers that, I guess.
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iNCEPTIONAL

Re: Rough figures for mono, stereo and surround sound?

Post by iNCEPTIONAL »

creaothceann wrote: Sun Jul 24, 2022 10:24 pm Do Star Ocean and/or Tales of Phantasia have surround sound enabled by default? They always sounded a bit different to me.

EDIT: This answers that, I guess.
I wonder if that's why the captain's voice always sounds so muffled in Star Ocean in YouTube videos, because it's either not set to the right mode for however they're recording it or I can't listen to it in surround sound properly. Kinda makes me wish I could hear it as properly intended now just to know if his voice actually is clearer when listened to correctly.
turboxray
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Re: Rough figures for mono, stereo and surround sound?

Post by turboxray »

iNCEPTIONAL wrote: Mon Jul 25, 2022 12:54 am
creaothceann wrote: Sun Jul 24, 2022 10:24 pm Do Star Ocean and/or Tales of Phantasia have surround sound enabled by default? They always sounded a bit different to me.

EDIT: This answers that, I guess.
I wonder if that's why the captain's voice always sounds so muffled in Star Ocean in YouTube videos, because it's either not set to the right mode for however they're recording it or I can't listen to it in surround sound properly. Kinda makes me wish I could hear it as properly intended now just to know if his voice actually is clearer when listened to correctly.
You might be interested in this: http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php/SNES_Sound_Ripper
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Dwedit
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Re: Rough figures for mono, stereo and surround sound?

Post by Dwedit »

Probably just a low sampling rate for the BRR sample.
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93143
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Re: Rough figures for mono, stereo and surround sound?

Post by 93143 »

High-fidelity audio takes a lot of space, even in BRR. Back in the day, you'd try to save as much space as possible, so the fact that there was voiced dialogue at all was considered impressive.
Pokun
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Re: Rough figures for mono, stereo and surround sound?

Post by Pokun »

creaothceann wrote: Sun Jul 24, 2022 10:24 pm Do Star Ocean and/or Tales of Phantasia have surround sound enabled by default? They always sounded a bit different to me.

EDIT: This answers that, I guess.
How do these games encode the surround though? Only two of them are said to be licensed by Dolby, where Tales and Star Ocean are not included.
lidnariq
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Re: Rough figures for mono, stereo and surround sound?

Post by lidnariq »

ProLogic2 is trivial to discover by accident. If you feed the decoder any signal where the phase is inverted from left to right, it'll show up somewhere on the surround and front speakers depending on relative volume.

ProLogic1 I don't know - my receiver with these modes broke and I haven't gotten around to trying to fix it. One can find datasheets for dedicated ProLogic1 decoder chips, such as Analog Devices's SSM2125. I wouldn't be surprised if the same accidental discovery happens to work there too.
Joe
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Re: Rough figures for mono, stereo and surround sound?

Post by Joe »

lidnariq wrote: Tue Jul 26, 2022 4:36 pmI wouldn't be surprised if the same accidental discovery happens to work there too.
According to FFmpeg, it does. It even works without band limiting.
Pokun
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Re: Rough figures for mono, stereo and surround sound?

Post by Pokun »

I see, I suppose the license is mostly to have a nice Dolby ProLogic logo on the game's box.
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