Dolby confirms Digital and TrueHD support for PS3, DPLII for Wii

Personally, I don't find it to be a problem. I play my multiplayer with friends and LAN in my 5.1 room, and my single player in my stereo room, so I never have any advantage with 5.1 anyways.

Ironic, considering Nintendo used to be both "PLAY IT LOUD!" and "Now you're playing with POWER!"

I think sound is quite important for a good gaming experience, but 5 speakers is definately enough.

I find it weird and disapointing that the Wii is pushing for true immersion with the speaker inside the wiimote, but they don't even have a surround-sound staple that has been around for what seems like forever. It'll still be fun but...

I was really hoping the Wii would have 5.1 this time around. It makes such a difference in the gaming experience.

No, no no! DPLII is not *simulated*!

It's real 5.1 that's *encoded* into a stereo track.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_Pro_Logic#Dolby_Pro_Logic_II

This is expected, but still disappointing. However, the Wii's lack of HD output and "real" surround sound aren't that much of an issue for the console: for one, it's not being marketing as THE powerhouse, and for two, an over-whelming amount of gamers still play on a SDTV with stero output (80% or more by some counts). Near the end of this life-cycle, most gamers will have HDTV and surround sound; they can play on the other systems for the full effect, or wait until Nintendo's next console, which will likely have HD and 5.1 channel sound.

While it's a shame that Nintendo's not offering all there could be in gaming, at least most gamers aren't missing out on the experience when they play on a standard gaming setup.

navstar is correct, it is 5.1 over analog stereo cables (and can also be used through a digital connection).

Its a very good technology (that even LucasArts uses regularly).

Very important.. as sound is a far more accesible technology than high definition televisions.
Surround sound offers a much more immersive experience for the end user than a HD television.. and still costing less.

Nintendo would have been wise to have supported 5.1 surround via an optical line out.. bang for your buck surround sound a great deal for a console.

More people would get surround sound as a result and then get HD next generation..

It's true. I read the wikipedia article too. If you ever played any of the PL II games on the Gamecube, they do a pretty good job of providing surround sound. Games that come to mind are Baten Kaitos (in the very beginning where there's chickens making noises) and of course, RE4. Just get a good decoder and you're all set. Good luck!

Everyone will have an HDTV when they are all that is sold. At no point is everyone, or even most people, going to have surround sound. It's not a new tech that is going to have revelations and price points that make it practical. It requires hooking up a bunch of speakers all around a room. Only people with dedicated entertainment areas in a stable living environment would usually even consider such a thing. It's not something you just throw into your average dorm or apartment or bedroom.

So meh. If I ever want some immersive sound, I'll put on a nice pair of headphones. Which aren't anything more than plain ol' stereo. And then I don't have to worry about neighbors bitching at me.

DPLII uses phase to encode multiple channels into one analog signal. It's kind of like how composite video encodes colours into one video signal. Composite video looks like a B&W signal to a B&W tv, but a color tv can extract "hidden" information to reproduce the extra color channels. Likewise, DPLII looks like a regular audio signal to a stereo tv, but a surround sound receiver can extract "hidden" information to reproduce the extra sound channels.

Is Composite video as good as Component? No. But it is real color. And DPLII is real surround sound.

Videogames have sound?

I really appreciate my dolby digital and HD gaming... but I wouldn't have missed it until I had it.

While Nintendo might gain some customers by keeping their costs down, they could also be alienating some of us that like their high-tech gear.

Nintendo might be doing the right thing, but I am not interested.

While Surround sound would have been better for the Wii, its not entirely stereo/simulated surround... its got the Controller Speaker remember? ;)

if you think want a good sample of Dolby Pro-Logic II on a Nintendo machine, check out Eternal Darkness for the Gamecube. it sounds great and better then some games/movies using Dolby Digital.

navstar, here's a quote from your own source:

"...offers an exceptionally stable sound field that SIMULATES 5.1 channel surround sound to a much more accurate degree than the original Pro Logic."

I'm also dissappointed that 5.1 was left out of this cycle as my thought process was "FINALLY Ninty is going to get 5.1 on us". It's not essential though. Just like everyone else is saying, 480p vs 720p, etc. As a gamer, you always want the nicer as, all other things equal (*cringe*), the experience can only be enhanced.

Actually, PS2 didn't support 5.1 channel Dolby Digital for games, only movies. PS2 games only support 2-channel stereo (which you could do through the optical port), so PS3 games are indeed getting a sound upgrade.

The only exception off the top of my head is FFX-2, which allows you to play back the FMVs in 5.1 Dolby Digital after you buy them from the theater. The rest of the game is completely 2-channel stereo--including the FMVs the first time you watch them in the game.

Most PS2 games were not Dolby Digital if I remember right. That was something the Xbox did. If I'm right then the PS2 does get an audio upgrade. The Wii only doing DPLII is ridiculous!!! Most recievers will automatically convert basic stereo to DPLII. Why they can't at least do DD is beyond me.

as a sound designer, it's frustratring.

Hopefully PS3 games will actually *USE* the surround they've given. Very rarely have I ever seen my receiver switch to "Doly Digital" mode while playing a PS2 game, it almost always stays at crappy old "All Ch Stereo". Xenosaga 2 did a split thing, with some cutscenes getting surround but most of the game going stereo. XS3 dropped surround entirely, though. I don't know if this was a storage space issue or not, but I suspect it may have been.

Is the Wii not going to have any digital sound output whatsoever? That is hardcore down-and-out TERRIBLE as far as I am concerned. I have a switch that I use for consoles. It switches video and audio. That switch goes into a single input on my surround sound receiver. I don't think this is a strange setup. But the Wii will not work this way. The receiver expects to get digital audio and component video from the switch. To get it to switch over to analog audio basically requires changing the fundamental setup of the receiver. Doing that every single time I want to play the Wii is not something I relish doing.

navstar, the wikipedia article actually contradicts you:

"...offers an exceptionally stable sound field that simulates 5.1 channel surround sound to a much more accurate degree than the original Pro Logic."

"Actually, PS2 didn't support 5.1 channel Dolby Digital for games, only movies."

That's true. But it did in fact support 5.1 DTS in the optical out as long as the game was coded to use this feature. I know because thats how I played GTA Vice City in 5.1 using optical.

"DLPII, which the GameCube also supported..."

Whats DLPII?

"How important is sound to your gaming experience?"

Very.

The more discrete channels the better too.

"No, no no! DPLII is not *simulated*!"

Um, yeah, it is... according to your own source:

"DPL II implements greatly enhanced steering compared to DPL, and as a result, offers an exceptionally stable sound field that simulates 5.1 channel surround sound to a much more accurate degree than the original Pro Logic."

I didn't think sound was important to games until I plugged in my first surround sound system to my 360. I bought my sound system for movies, not games, and was pleasantly surprised to find out I could play in DD. Now, the sense of immersion I've felt in games recently blows away any other technological upgrade I've ever run across -- especially HD. You may think sound isn't a big deal in games, but just know that I can hear you sneaking behind me in Halo and coming up on my right in PGR3, and that's a bigger advantage than I ever would have imagined.

DPLII sounded great on the Gamecube. In a blind test, you probably could not find a single people who could tell the difference between DD5.1 and DPLII. They are both that good.

That said, any receiver made in the past 7 years should have DPLII support, so this isn't exactly an unsupported technology.

The other reason the PS3 and 360 support DD5.1 is because they will also be playing movies that do DD and DTS. So along with that, they get the support in the games. The Wii doesn't play movies, so there is no reason to use DD5.1 when DPLII is cheaper and sounds just as good.

Actually, PS2 games do not support Dolby Digital, they only supported Pro Logic II. All the Prince of Persia games were PLII but their Xbox equivalents were Dolby Digital.. which was nice.

Also, Kingdom Hearts II, God of War, RE4... I can go on. All PLII.

So PS3 definitely gets a nice upgrade with the DD support for games! It's not 7.1, which is kind of crummy, but I don't have a 7.1 setup yet anyways.

As for Wii... whiskey tango foxtrot? PLII is good and all, but come on Nintendo, step it up a bit.

Maybe they just don't want to have to feature a S/PDIF connection of some type.

Oh well.

Sweet kids...I've had 5.1 since the original Xbox and believe me, it's quite the advantage, especially for FPS's. Maybe I just have good ears but audio trumps visual any day of the week in FPS Deathmatch. So much so, that with games like COD2 on 360, I find myself turning my in-game music tracks to a low setting and cranking up the sounds of the game. The majority of players don't even crouch in the game (makes you silent but slower) and it turns into shooting fish in a barrel. You could camp if you wanted to and just wait for people to run by--with 5.1 surround sound, you can hear them coming from any direction. You just have to quick on the trigger...

So, yes, please, keep this on the down-low--5.1 is junk for gaming, there's really no reason for it, true full 5.1 doesn't start until $ony says it does--SO SOWWY!!! CHUMPS!

Irrelevant for this article, but they did it by linking to that 2005 article, Dolby uses too many channels.

I wonder about that 13.1 system. One person pointed out wanting 13.3, as a joke, but why not at least two subs, if properly positioned, etc, couldn't that add more oompf to the sound?

Anyway, my actual question regarding that 13.1 is what are the positions? When watching Star Wars or any space epic, you should be able to hear sounds ALL AROUND, and any movie with planes would need it too, and at the LEAST, I want a channel over my head. A speaker in the floor may be hard to pull off, home or thater, but, why not? fully immerse in the sound. When a helicopter is coming in for a landing over the cameras head, they just crank up the volume...I'd love to hear it positionally directly over head.

So, what is it? Where are the speakers? 5 in front, 5 in back, 2 on the sides, one directly overhead? That's 13...

I'd dig it. I can't get it, but I'd dig it!

The simulated aspect of DPLII is coreect but it does make use of only two stero speakers. If you have the correct stereo it will decode the two analog inputs into output from a 5.1 speaker set up.

I think that this was a mistake for Nintendo. I love my Gamecube and Pro Logic was fine for the system but an upgrade to digital 5.1 would have been a better choice for the Wii considering the fact that Nintendo is trying to really push immersive gameplay. That being said, at least there is a decent alternative in DPLII

Whoops. I meant that it does not only use two stereo speakers. Sorry

The Wii has 5.1 +1. That's 7 speakers. Quite a lot even for an average gamer. The PS3 has 6 speakers (8 for movies, but we're talking games here). Think about that for a while.

There are a lot of armchair experts here who don't have the slightest clue what DPLII is or how it works.

In DPLII, multiple discrete audio channels are "matrix-encoded". The data for all 5.1 channels is initially generated! The surround channels are ENCODED into the left/right channels using a phase-shift. A DPLII amplifier then EXTRACTS the surround channels from the left/right channels by comparing the inverse phase shifted stereo signals. Therefore, a DPLII amplifier can recover 5.1 individual audio channels (although not perfectly).

In terms computer geeks might understand... 6 channels are multiplexed into 2, and then de-multiplexed back into 6 channels. However, in the process, the bandwidth of each channel is reduced.

I couldn't care less. Most of the time, I even use the standard TV speakers, and when I remember to, I output it to the (slightly less crappy) stereo speakers.

"There are a lot of armchair experts here who don't have the slightest clue what DPLII is or how it works."

I think most people understand perfectly how it works. What they don't seem to agree with you (and some others) on is how *well* it does or doesn't work. That doesn't mean they don't understand it, though, anymore than my saying I don't like sushi means I don't understand what it is either. It *is* possible to understand something and not like it, you know, or to simply prefer something better.

DPLII does not offer 5.1 discrete channels. It just doesn't. Discrete means the channels are kept separate at all times; if I'm encoding the audio for my game and I program the game to say "put the crowd noise in the right rear speaker", I don't need to rely on some technical wizardry inside a gamer's decoder to hopefully do it well enough and to not leak anything into any other speaker. I know it'll be done and done properly, with the full bandwidth available and no potential for leakage.

Similarly, if I'm a gamer, I know with discrete surround that I'm going to get crystal clarity from my surround effects; that my LFE will go to my subwoofer and only my subwoofer, that my surround effects will go to my surround speakers and only my surround speakers. There is no such guarantee with DPLII.

DPLII is decent enough, but you can't argue that the technology is anywhere close to even first-gen Dolby Digital. You can pretty easily test this by comparing the DD and DPLII soundtracks on a DVD that includes both. (Just switch your amp back and forth between soundtracks.)

and btw, the PS2 *did* support Dolby Digital for games, it's just that few developers used it and possibly never in full 5.1 mode (Dolby Digital does not mean "5.1" - it can be anything from 2.0 on up). GTA: Vice City, for example, was Dolby Digital 4.0, I believe. (Google says it was 5.1, but it wasn't - easy enough to test for yourself if you've got a receiver that tells you the DD mode it's in.)

Thanks Evan. I was about to write something similar to that. Another way to look at it is like it's a lossy compression. You get all this other data in the "bandwidth" of stereo channels, and then decompress it out the other end and have your data, albeit not as perfect as it went in.

One thing I'm not sure of, that you may be able to help with, is if they haven't encoded 5.1 into the source, does DPLII try and simulate it from the stereo data only?

OK, think I answered my own question. In the wikipedia article the table near the bottom shows what DPLII does. Depending on the setting you have your decoder set to it does different things. The "Music" setting will "Upmix Plain Stereo into 5.1 from sources such as CDs."

My biggest concern with the Wii not supporting Dolby Digital is that developers will not spend the same amount of time developing sound for the Wii as they will for the Xbox & PS3. Even though surround sound through DPLII could sound nearly as good as DD, it most likely won't.

I'm not surprised that audio was practically "overlooked" in this new console generation.

Audio, unfortunately, continues to be viewed as a subset of the game engine, and thus not a hardware issue at all.

But even games like Halo 2, and Half-Life 2, could benefit from a better sound engine.

Did anybody think that the audio in Call of Duty 2 was borderline godawful? Ok, there were some AWSOME moments in there. A lot of great effects that were positioned in a 360-degree soundfield. But come on, when you've got a distant explosion, it doesn't come to your ears as a discretely positioned mono source!

But unless you've got a hardware architecture that will facilitate 4-6 different post-processing stages, then we're never going to get close to a "film audio experience."

I use the speaker that are on the TV so I don't care. Visuals are much more important and I think the Wii will wear off early for that reason.

That's not true, the PS3 DOES get an audio upgrade as the PS2 did NOT do Dolby Digital 5.1 IN-game. It did DD 5.1 for movies, but not for in-game, only Dolby Pro-logic

"if I'm encoding the audio for my game and I program the game to say "put the crowd noise in the right rear speaker", I don't need to rely on some technical wizardry inside a gamer's decoder to hopefully do it well enough and to not leak anything into any other speaker."

Unless you can guarantee that the gamer will even HAVE a rear right speaker, that's the wrong way of thinking about it.

What you should be doing is telling the audio engine "put the crowd noise at 5 o'clock in relation to the gamer", and then it becomes the engine's job to figure out what speaker or speakers that corresponds to. In a DD5.1 setup, that might be just the rear right speaker. In a Dolby PL1 setup, that might be a mixture of the right speaker and the rear speaker. In a mono setup, that would be the one 3" speaker built into the cheapskate's cruddy TV. You can't know the physical layout, so you have think of audio positioning in more abstract terms.

"That's true. But it did in fact support 5.1 DTS in the optical out as long as the game was coded to use this feature. I know because thats how I played GTA Vice City in 5.1 using optical."

It was 4.1 actually. Few games used it but ultimately the resources needed to do it were better spent on graphics.

I wonder if the PS3 still supports SACD??? It was listed as a feature both at E3 '05, on the PS3 website, and at CES (in the form of the SACD symbol on the case). Granted, on the Sony PS3 website it was listed as a music only feature, but I don't see why games couldn't support it as well. That would be an outstanding audio upgrade.

wow. i'm glad to know i'm not the only one that thought cod2's audio for the 360 was horrid.

being that i have a nice 7.1 system and a crappy 27" non-hd tv, i'd say i love better audio any day. oblivion did submerse me in another world through audio. so did condemned. cod2 was disappointing though when the germans raided me and i could hear a ton of screaming that sounded like it was coming from one dude. it didn't sound like a wall of enemies was coming towards me. the explosions sounded a little weak, too. so i guess along with the technology, a little more effort into sound production/programming/whatever would be nice. halo 2 had awesome sound effects, and black's weapons seemed to pack a more powerful punch because of the sound effects. ssx tricky, the first game i played for the ps2, was in DTS, and i played it just because it sounded great. for 3 hours straight. i don't even like snowboarding.

i'm not going to say DPLII doesn't work. i played all the way through metroid prime for the gamecube, and it worked. i could hear enemies behind me and in all directions. and the music at the title screen drove some nice deep bass, and sounded awesome.

i can understand why people are choosy about optical though. the fact that a tiny light running through a cable carrying my sound impresses the crap out of my girlfriend. and there is a nice warm feeling you get, knowing your audio channels aren't mixing together. it's kind of like when you have that seperate tray on your plate for mash potatos, and the other for peas. you don't want that stuff mixing together.

but with all this extra storage space coming, and stress on hdtv, i wish all games would use DTS-ES, honestly. it just sounds really nice. and i can tell the difference. i'll switch discs like i did with LOTR the extended edition if i have to, i don't care. i just love that little DTS piano sequence. sends shivers down my back every time.

I'm a bit disappointed in no major sound improvements for games this generation. I have to agree that sound always get the short shrift; from motherboard audio to game systems, decent sound just gets IGNORED. People who wouldn't blink at buying a $1000 videocard setup flip out if you mention spending $100 on a soundcard. It just makes no sense to me.

That said, the Gamecube did decent surround sound, but nowhere near as good as Xbox games handled it. Granted, that could be a developer issue (like GC games looking much worse than Xbox-- or even PS2-- versions when the hardware was much closer) but it's still disappointing.

So... it's not a deal killer, but it would've been nice to get DD5.1 out of the Wii.

PS2 was just plain old stereo but occasionally used DPL2 for games, and Dolby Digital for cut scenes and films. The PS3 is an upgrade because the games will be in Dolby Digital 5.1 (for gameplay) and the films in 7.1.

Sound quality is very important to me, but I listen using headphones. So long as the audio isn't too muddy, it's all good.

What I hate is "fake" 3D processing which can introduce echoes. Even "fast" audio modes in most games these days use all kinds of filters and stuff that alters the scope of the sound, boosts bass, and so on. I hate that crap. On speakers it's bad enough, but try listening to that stuff on headphones. Headache city.

I don't understand the reasoning behind putting more and more specific high-end features into a console. Doesn't that limit your potential market? If 30% of people have HD and 10% of those have systems capable of Dolby TrueHD... how will developers ever recoup their costs? How much development times will go into these hyper narrow technologies?

For you asshats that keep insisting Dolby Pro Logic II is 'simulated' surround sound. When folks talk about 'simulated' surround sound most people think of this like the way the DS simulates surround sound from two speakers. DPLII uses two stereo channels (not speakers) but still requires 5 separate speakers for the effect (plus a subwoofer if you want).

DPLII does not 'simulate' surround as the sound is actually encoded as separate channels inside of a stereo signal. The DPLII decoder separates these channels into discrete channels for your 4 speakers, plus center and subwoofer. The wikipedia link is inaccurate. Read here:

http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/volume_8_1/dolby-prologic2-3-2001.html