A possible improvement to sound for 5.1 surround users

  • Thread starter Thread starter boons
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boons

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Hi Guys,
Not sure if anyone had mentioned this...Just like to share a pleasant experience last night through my desperate effort to improve the game sound... The main reason I move on to GTR2 and FM4 after 6 mths of playing GT5 is due to the weird vacume-like soft engine sound of GT5....which spoil the gameplay immersiveness. I have a dedicated home theater room with acoustic treatment and using an entry level amp-onkyo with 5.1 speakers setup. I use PS3 optical out though for audio. I using G27 and only played on in car/interior view.

Ok.. So i had tried out numerous time on "Living Room" setting and "small home theater" setting, I am quite confirmed "Living Room" sounded much better for me after numerous comparisons. I understand "small home theater" setting is for bringing out more sound detail and bass but it just didn't happen despite i crank up my system by 20% more.. Then Suddenly i recall that my PC GTR2 is on dual stereo channel setting and it sounded so sweet on the bass, engine throaty sound. I set my GT5 sound out to 2 channel instead of 5.1. Suddenly i think i experienced the following 10% improvement which I will not go back to 5.1 again!

- There is a low bass grunting sound of the engine now, engine sounded much more beefy, tried on NSX and S2000 and AE86...impressed...!
- The weird effect of our car engine sound lowered and AI sound increased when nearing AI is solved...Now my car sound is at constant loud and clear level, while we still can hear AI engine sound and road noise. The way i like it.
- My preliminary conclusion is that the way the game sound recorded in 5.1 may have some issue..it "weaken" own car sound and emphasize AI and surrounding sound, hence we can only hear soft vacume like whizzing sound of our car constantly if on 5.1 for my case.

Do try out guys if you always on 5.1 and never tried 2 channel.. Do post your feel? Pardon me if this is discussed before.. As i experienced the improvement and not going back to 5.1, I feel so excited to share here. Thanks for reading and commenting.

P/S - I still pray hard one day PD can make GT5/6 sound like the great PC SIMs sound.
 
boons
Hi Guys,
Not sure if anyone had mentioned this...Just like to share a pleasant experience last night through my desperate effort to improve the game sound... The main reason I move on to GTR2 and FM4 after 6 mths of playing GT5 is due to the weird vacume-like soft engine sound of GT5....which spoil the gameplay immersiveness. I have a dedicated home theater room with acoustic treatment and using an entry level amp-onkyo with 5.1 speakers setup. I use PS3 optical out though for audio. I using G27 and only played on in car/interior view.

Ok.. So i had tried out numerous time on "Living Room" setting and "small home theater" setting, I am quite confirmed "Living Room" sounded much better for me after numerous comparisons. I understand "small home theater" setting is for bringing out more sound detail and bass but it just didn't happen despite i crank up my system by 20% more.. Then Suddenly i recall that my PC GTR2 is on dual stereo channel setting and it sounded so sweet on the bass, engine throaty sound. I set my GT5 sound out to 2 channel instead of 5.1. Suddenly i think i experienced the following 10% improvement which I will not go back to 5.1 again!

- There is a low bass grunting sound of the engine now, engine sounded much more beefy, tried on NSX and S2000 and AE86...impressed...!
- The weird effect of our car engine sound lowered and AI sound increased when nearing AI is solved...Now my car sound is at constant loud and clear level, while we still can hear AI engine sound and road noise. The way i like it.
- My preliminary conclusion is that the way the game sound recorded in 5.1 may have some issue..it "weaken" own car sound and emphasize AI and surrounding sound, hence we can only hear soft vacume like whizzing sound of our car constantly if on 5.1 for my case.

Do try out guys if you always on 5.1 and never tried 2 channel.. Do post your feel? Pardon me if this is discussed before.. As i experienced the improvement and not going back to 5.1, I feel so excited to share here. Thanks for reading and commenting.

P/S - I still pray hard one day PD can make GT5/6 sound like the great PC SIMs sound.
Click to expand...
Nice man I have a 7.1 HDMI Very good with the HDMI louder and clearer. Also the rear speakers act the the exhaust while the front acts like the engine. When driving MR cars the rear spears act as the motor and the exhaust. 👍
 
Hi JDMKing,
Thanks for your comment bro. Hmmm.. seems like hdmi sound is much better than my optical out 5.1 sound? For my 5.1, I dont hear any distinct difference in surround effect that much, though I can hear ai car sound move to the back when I zoom past, but i lost out a lot on my own car engine low bass grunt sound. If you free bro, can you try out 2 channel and see if you can feel any difference or improvement that i felt? Tks

Can any bro using hdmi 5.1 or optical 5.1 comment as well? Tks.
 
boons
Hi JDMKing,
Thanks for your comment bro. Hmmm.. seems like hdmi sound is much better than my optical out 5.1 sound? For my 5.1, I dont hear any distinct difference in surround effect that much, though I can hear ai car sound move to the back when I zoom past, but i lost out a lot on my own car engine low bass grunt sound. If you free bro, can you try out 2 channel and see if you can feel any difference or improvement that i felt? Tks

Can any bro using hdmi 5.1 or optical 5.1 comment as well? Tks.
Click to expand...

Oh I have a 5.1 also which I play on now and mainly optical cord, so I know what your talking about and I agree. 👍
 
I use 5.1 THX certified with 2 separate subs on fibre optic and have no problems with the sound, Its set at large theatre and is extremely good.
 
JDMKING13
Oh I have a 5.1 also which I play on now and mainly optical cord, so I know what your talking about and I agree. 👍
Click to expand...

When you say you use an hdmi 7.1 you mean the connection to the receiver?
What exactly is your output from the Ps3. I use hdmi for image and optical for 5.1 sound. Am I missing something?
 
djs
When you say you use an hdmi 7.1 you mean the connection to the receiver?
What exactly is your output from the Ps3. I use hdmi for image and optical for 5.1 sound. Am I missing something?
Click to expand...

No... And it sounds like your setup is a bit like mine. I prioritize video over audio, as with hd video and 3d it is more important to have the cleanest signal directly from the ps3 to the TV (thus HDMI). This is where I thought I had a problem, my tv converts Bitstream signals to PCM and "normalizes" it while narrowing it to 2channels + a sub preout for whatever reason. I have a 7.1 setup which is cool except most consumer grade media is MAYBE mastered for 5.1 properly. I also have a girlfriend who doesnt like to be awoken by roaring cars and the "thump" of my crashes. In any case, at night, i use the TV speakers for audio so I do not wake her. All of these reasons are why I run an optical out to My reciever and have the "multi audio out" on in the "sound" section of the XMB. Someone previously mentioned his super-cool sounding "fiber optic 7.2 setup" not realizing that optical cables can only carry 5.1 audio. If this is true his audio equipment is malfunctioning.
Long story short, If you have your audio equipment in a closet or away from your screen you will want direct connections from sources and not to pass, say, a video signal from your ps3 to your reciever, then to your tv. If your tv can pass audio over HDMI UNCOMPRESSED or UNTOUCHED to your reciever then you are set and that's what you should do. If not, you have the best setup you can get and having tested different setups, I can attest to the fact that the difference between 7.1 and 5.1 is negligible unless you have a better setup than me which is possible but I doubt and you have some master copies of Blue-rays or some old Laser-disks laying around. Hope this helps put you at ease... Did you happen to ever get the HDMI auto-switching to work properly with your onkyo?
 
Just thought I'd point out that optical (S/PDIF) can only carry a single stereo PCM stream. The 5.1 is compressed into that stereo channel, and the receiver has to detect the bitstream in order to know to decode it properly. In that sense, it's perfectly possible to encode 7.2 (why you'd need two separate LFE channels is beyond me; in fact, I don't see anyone who claimed to have 7.2 on optical) but you'd have a hard time finding a receiver for it in your local shop that wouldn't just emit that nasty digital "noise".

It's odd that the 5.1 encoding for optical would be so badly broken, as claimed above. Is it DTS or Dolby? Remember that it's a compressed (lossy) format in both cases, and DTS is generally (but not always) "better" with channel separation and overall detail thanks to its higher bitrate. HDMI allows the use of the HD audio formats Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD (and of course the full PCM streams) which are lossless, so will automatically sound much better.

If it sounds bad on optical 5.1, try the other encoding method (DD / DTS); if it's still poor, I suppose HDMI might be the only option.
 
boons
Hi Guys,
Not sure if anyone had mentioned this...Just like to share a pleasant experience last night through my desperate effort to improve the game sound... The main reason I move on to GTR2 and FM4 after 6 mths of playing GT5 is due to the weird vacume-like soft engine sound of GT5....which spoil the gameplay immersiveness. I have a dedicated home theater room with acoustic treatment and using an entry level amp-onkyo with 5.1 speakers setup. I use PS3 optical out though for audio. I using G27 and only played on in car/interior view.

Ok.. So i had tried out numerous time on "Living Room" setting and "small home theater" setting, I am quite confirmed "Living Room" sounded much better for me after numerous comparisons. I understand "small home theater" setting is for bringing out more sound detail and bass but it just didn't happen despite i crank up my system by 20% more.. Then Suddenly i recall that my PC GTR2 is on dual stereo channel setting and it sounded so sweet on the bass, engine throaty sound. I set my GT5 sound out to 2 channel instead of 5.1. Suddenly i think i experienced the following 10% improvement which I will not go back to 5.1 again!

- There is a low bass grunting sound of the engine now, engine sounded much more beefy, tried on NSX and S2000 and AE86...impressed...!
- The weird effect of our car engine sound lowered and AI sound increased when nearing AI is solved...Now my car sound is at constant loud and clear level, while we still can hear AI engine sound and road noise. The way i like it.
- My preliminary conclusion is that the way the game sound recorded in 5.1 may have some issue..it "weaken" own car sound and emphasize AI and surrounding sound, hence we can only hear soft vacume like whizzing sound of our car constantly if on 5.1 for my case.

Do try out guys if you always on 5.1 and never tried 2 channel.. Do post your feel? Pardon me if this is discussed before.. As i experienced the improvement and not going back to 5.1, I feel so excited to share here. Thanks for reading and commenting.

P/S - I still pray hard one day PD can make GT5/6 sound like the great PC SIMs sound.
Click to expand...

hey boons,
i have a denon 3808, 5.1 system, with optical cable.
Last day i was doing the rally challenge, where the voice of the codriver suggest you corners: s3-s4, etc...
I was earing his voice very LOW and my audio setup in GT5 is:
race effects volume 100
race music volume 80

I tried several options and basically these are the results:
-in order to hear the co-driver voice louder, you have to lower race effects volume to defualt 90 or 80, therefore if you want louder overall, crank up the volume of your TV/amplifier.

As far as General Audio System Settings:
I used to select big home theatre as long as my Denon 3808 is a quit good amplifier, capable of 7.1, and Dolby TrueHD, so i believed it was the good choice; but i have to crank my volume to like -10db or 0db to hear all the sounds where i usually listen to 5.1 movies at -20db -15db.
Indeed the wideness of the sound is good

Therefore i tried the "small theatre", the overall volume is louder, but actually i feel the overall power of sounds better

Now I'm using a good Headset (Astro A40 with mixamp) and finally i stickied with
Living room because volume is higher and probably i feel better sound power.

So same results as yours, even if it is strange to feel better sound from living room setting than home theatre...

Now I'm going to try your setting.

Did you tried anyway the other car views, to nderstand the differences?
 

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