Dunvi wrote...
Deerber wrote...
Dunvi wrote...
.... you know, i can hear positional cues and distance and stuff through both my normal speakers and my normal cheap "i'm walking down the street there's no point in quality" headphones... makes me wonder if you guys have crap speaker setups or something.
did you guys know that if you set up your speakers dumbly you'll cancel out half of the sounds?
I do hear positional cues both with my stereo and with my headset, but I didn't know you could set speakers "dumbly". How do I check if mine aren't?
The really simple version is that sound waves have a length. If you get the same sound wave from two sources at the same point in that wave length, they combine (double). If you get them at exactly opposite points, they cancel out entirely. And everything in between (linear interpolation).
So theoretically, if you are exactly equally positioned between your speakers, and they are pointing directly towards you, you are doing pretty good (though you should also experiment with distance and top angle for best quality). Of course, we are real people and we are never going to be perfectly situated between your speakers, so depending on the exact set-up, larger sound waves (big low booms) aren't going to really be affected but you will start loosing specific unlucky high-frequency sounds.
If you're curious, btw, some of the really low bass booms are on the order of a meter in length. You'll notice that's similar to a doorway? That's why bass sounds will travel all the way throughout the house while everything else just disappears around the corner.
ETA: an interesting thing to try can be to really think about what you're hearing in a high-dynamic range setting, and then move like a foot to the side and think about it again. If you have good ears you should be able to hear some things sort of get murky, or muted, while other sounds will start to stand out.
Note that this is all from the point of view of mono-tracked sounds - in context of a game that tries to do positional audio, that's stuff right behind or in front of you. Since the game is trying to modify the sound waves it sends to each speaker by position, that's why distance and angle do actually play a part as well - the wrong angles will just completely crap out those positional attempts.
ETA2: also I forgot to mention, sound waves reflect, and depending on your walls, what you have on them (including paint), etc., they can reflect a lot. So you should also experiement with moving speakers away from walls, different orientations towards corners, etc., etc., raising them off the desk too since they will reflect off of that (and also the surface the speakers are on can absorb the speaker's vibrations which will reduce the quality of the sounds, which is why higher quality 2.1 systems have heavy tweeters). Tweeters create sounds that are on the order of, like a foot, maybe? I don't know for certain, I'd have to do the math 
ETA3: 
i think my classical musician/audio engineering/physics backgrounds are all showing
Lol. So much for the acoustic lesson. "Dammit girl, I'm a physicist, not a..." Oh. Wait.
I was thinking there was some wrong way to set them up via computer, like you had to run some programs or some **** like that... Because on that, I would definitely need some advice
Heldarion wrote...
iBRomano wrote...
Get a room, you two.
u jelly?
... Ah c'mon, eveyrone knows Dunvi's everyone's girl here... And noone's at the same time
Oh anyway... My current headset is the base apple one for Iphones/Ipods. It works great!
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