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 EAX® PurePath™
Truly Cinematic Gaming Audio
EAX® PurePath™ delivers the most accurate and cinematic surround sound ever experienced! It delivers the same level of precision surround as you would experience in a DTS® or Dolby® Digital encoded movie. It also delivers a dedicated bass feed for an incredibly explosive audio experience!
When you watch a movie at the cinema, or at home with a home-theatre system, you are listening to either Dolby® Digital or DTS®. These are special types of audio that have been encoded to play from specific speakers at specific times to deliver that surround-sound feeling. These systems are also known as 5.1 or 7.1 systems.
This technology has been used for many years in movie sound, but is relatively new to gaming audio. In previous versions of EAX®, developers could specify where, in a 360 degree space a particular sound should come from. The sound card would then map the sound to the correct position within the current speaker array. However, there was no way to specify a specific speaker, or combination of speakers that a sound should come from other than by using 3D positional coordinates.
With EAX® PurePath™, developers now have total control over exactly which speaker (or speakers) the sound should be played through. This is particularly useful, for instance, for controlling bass reproduction through the subwoofer for Low Frequency Enhancement.
Many people know that the 5.1 & 7.1 numbers mean 5 or 7 surround speakers plus 1 subwoofer, but very few appreciate the importance of the '.1'! In fact, a movie sound track is encoded to pass specific sounds to the subwoofer, such as explosions - anything that needs a lot of bass. This approach allows the audio to have a lot of impact without overriding all speakers with bass that they cannot handle.
However, until now the '.1' in games was a general bass feed that came from all the sounds playing in the game. There was very little control over which content went to the subwoofer. EAX® PurePath™ changes all this. It gives control of the Low Frequency Enhancement (LFE) channel to game developers, so they can now feed as many or as few of the 128 available voices to the subwoofer. For you this means a far more powerful bass for those sounds that need it, and beautifully precise highs for those sounds that don't. Yes, truly cinematic audio in games is now here!
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