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 128 Voices
More Audio Detail Than Ever Before!
128 voices support provides the most detailed and rich audio ever heard in gaming! It also allows the music in a game to change based on actions during game-play. For instance the music can become more intense as your health goes down. Combine great interactive music with extreme detail and your gaming audio will become Xtreme Fidelity audio!
The first version of EAX® supported 8 simultaneous voices (sounds). If more were required then the 'oldest' voice (the one that had been playing longest) was shut-off. Developers quickly used-up these voices (one machine-gun sound would use up more than 8!) and so EAX™ 2.0 increased the voice count to 32. Yet again developers hit the limit by adding more detail: now they could add the sound of a gun's hammer mechanism and recoil. Now every shot fired demanded three voices instead of one! And so with EAX® ADVANCED HD™ 3.0 the voice count was doubled to 64. Game developers were happy - for a while.
Continuing progress means that games are starting to hit the voice wall again. And now there's a further development that could add far more excitement to a game's audio - music!
Yes, we know: the first thing many gamers do is turn the music off - and who can blame them? Almost all games use CD-based static stereo music that just plays no matter what is going on in the game. Movies just aren't like that! When you watch a movie the music can make a scary moment terrifying! What if you could have that 'movie music' experience in your games? What if the music changed according to what you were doing in the game, your state of health, or armour? What if the music seemed to move around you instead of being stuck in the two front speakers? That would be cool! Well Creative has developed a technology that does just that! It's called ISACT® Music (Interactive Spatial Audio Composition Tool) and it allows all those things to happen. Now your game will sound just like a movie - except you decide what happens next!
To make this happen requires lots of voices, because the music has to become an integral part of a game's audio. What's more, some developers want to add even more sound detail into their games. So we doubled the voice count again - to 128 simultaneous voices.
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