from Hacker News

It's called a dance floor

by wmeredith on 11/4/24, 4:04 PM with 93 comments

• by mmastrac on 11/4/24, 4:20 PM

  QSound was magic at the time. We had a DSP class in my EE degree where we implemented a very minor transform that would shift position of audio and it was wild.

  It's impossible to get 3D audio to be absolutely as flawless as the real world because human ears all vary slightly and your 3D spacial perception of sound is literally tuned on your own ears, but QSound's transfer functions come as close as you can get.

  The algorithm also falls apart a bit outside of the sweet spot, and is really only useful in headphones and specific cases where a human is known to be placed in a certain location relative to speakers.

  The original model was developed using a simulated human head and lots of hand-tuning. I am curious if we've advanced far enough with tech that a more modern set of transfer function parameters could be developed.

  Nothing beats N speakers for positional audio, but this is a pretty decent replacement if the conditions are ideal.

  OpenAL was designed as an open-source library to bring 3D audio to the masses in the same way that OpenGL did (basically exposing QSound/equivalent hardware on sound cards to an API), but I'm not sure what happened to it [1].

  [1] https://www.openal.org/documentation/openal-1.1-specificatio...

• by lucasoshiro on 11/4/24, 5:11 PM

  If you like this kind of stereophonic sound, I recommend Art of Noise. Here are some songs from them:

  Moments in Love: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNkcZ8QoNuI

  Paranoimia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5F8BD6gNOag

  Dragnet '88: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6JQO0KnUZY

  I recommend to set the videos to the highest quality and to listen using headphones

• by joenot443 on 11/4/24, 5:25 PM

  I remember being shown Virtual Barbershop on 2000s YouTube as a teenager. I was absolutely blown away by the experience, it did for my ears like what 2024 VR does for my eyes. Total magic.

  https://www.qsound.com/demos/virtualbarbershop_long.htm

  Very cool to see it’s from the same company!

• by frankus on 11/4/24, 4:29 PM

  As a young Gen Xer it's fun to go back and listen to radio hits I heard growing up (on mostly terrible sound systems playing radio or cassette tapes) using modern audio hardware. There's a lot of depth in many tracks that I couldn't really appreciate at the time, because even a half-decent sound system was the kind of luxury I (or my parents) wouldn't have splurged on.

• by wmeredith on 11/4/24, 4:04 PM

  Pound-for-pound, Vogue by Madonna is one of the most remarkable examples of artificial stereophonic sound ever produced.

  As a lover of hi-fi, Madonna wasn't really on my radar until someone steered me toward this gem. After about 50 listens and some really interesting research on QSound (the tech used to produce it), I ended up featuring it in my hi-fi music recommendation newsletter.

• by petercooper on 11/4/24, 6:29 PM

  Sustained synth chords gently surround, laying the foundation for sharp snaps in front and to the right. A Roland TR-909 drum machine starts far in the distance on the left

  I thought I'd "follow along" by listening to the song myself, and oddly all the directions were the very opposite of those stated in the article on both my phone and desktop with both Spotify and Apple Music (and on both the remaster and original version of the album). I have it on vinyl and CD somewhere, I'll try that later, maybe they are more authentic.

• by wrs on 11/4/24, 4:48 PM

  Sting’s solo album The Soul Cages was another early QSound adopter. I can remember popping it in the CD player and having a “What the…” moment.

• by dfxm12 on 11/4/24, 7:04 PM

  Capcom's CPS 2 arcade system also used Q Sound. Street Fighter Alpha 3, which ran on that hardware, has some iconic chiptunes. An arcade game was a great use of the technology as well, since the algorithm building the 3D soundscape would work best when you can reasonably assume where the listeners will be relative to the speakers.

  This is an example bgm from the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huA5sKl7K-U

  and the Q sound "demo": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYIy6lavsd4

• by achille on 11/4/24, 8:12 PM

  Just listened to Vogue on my headphones, and I'm unable to notice anything unique about the soundscape of this song. What do you folks hear and when do you hear it? At what point in the song?

• by Terr_ on 11/4/24, 6:21 PM

  I remember a contemporary technology, Aureal's A3D, experiencing the magic of having one of their sound-cards and playing Counter Strike 1.x. Enemy footsteps felt almost as good as seeing them. Maybe it's nostalgia, but I never quite recaptured that sense with other hardware/games.

  Another search-able term to drop in here is "Head-Related Transfer Functions" (HRTF), where the inputs are a sound and a given relative location, and the problem is how to subtly adjust that sound for each "ear", giving your brain the kinds of cues normally imparted by the shape of your ears and the different materials in your skull, etc.

  Aureal suffered from a set of legal battles with a then-not-so-huge company named Creative, which eventually bought out the bankrupt remains.

  [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aureal_Semiconductor

• by fsckboy on 11/4/24, 6:26 PM

  it's an interesting topic, but it's dumb to talk about how important this is, but at the same time conflate "stereo" with "binaural". It's not clear what is being measured here in terms of the result being "good"

  (stereo is for creating a realistic sound field for a number of people in your living room; binaural is for creating a realistic sound field for 1 person with headphones. there are issues and compromises either way, for example one of the problems with binaural is that when you turn your head, the virtual "stage full of musicians" swings around along with your perspective)

  there was no technical detail provided here

  and why is there a ?ref=seekhifi.com on the wikipedia URL? is this some new SEO idea?

• by mhh__ on 11/4/24, 7:03 PM

  Peter Wright (of Spycatcher fame) wrote that he got good results in the 60s helping people snoop on conversations (i.e. cocktail party problem) by playing mono audio as "stereo" with a slight phase shift in one ear.

• by andy_ppp on 11/5/24, 4:08 PM

  I once heard Marvin Gaye's album What's Going On [1] through a $30000 HiFi and I could not believe the stereo information that was available on good vinyl and a valve amp. You could hear how far each of the backing singers were away from their microphone, it was unbelievable.

  [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApthDWoPMFQ&list=PLc60gkdW0b...

• by exabrial on 11/4/24, 4:26 PM

  This is one of my favorite hits from the era. It's a masterpiece.

• by qingcharles on 11/9/24, 3:51 AM

  This is the modern version that is all the rage on social media these days:

  https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=8d+audio

• by wappieslurkz on 11/5/24, 11:22 PM

  Vogue is indeed a stereo fest. But I always felt sorry for the handclap/fingersnap that seems to have been forgotten, trying to get some attention on the left hand side of the mix. Dry and lonely without any shine or treatment. Maybe it's a symbol for the shy people doing their thing on the darker sides of the dance floor...

• by BlindEyeHalo on 11/5/24, 2:52 PM

  Anyone interested in more recent examples, look up the binaural versions of some of Jean-Michel Jarre's albums.

  Most of his music is very experimental but I recommend "Zero Gravity" from "Live in Notre Dame - Binaural headphone mix". It is a straight forward EDM track.

• by djborschtbeets on 11/4/24, 10:05 PM

  Okay, I just listened to this on my 16" MacBook Pro from 2023.

  Holy ** its incredible. The drums have a physical space, everything can be placed in a location. I've seen it in cars, but with my speakers on my laptop this is grade A.

• by wazoox on 11/5/24, 3:08 PM

  Sting's "The Soul Cages" from the same year is also relying quite heavily on Q-Sound (or it could be RDS, the alternative competing technology from Roland, I don't remember exacly).

• by jensenbox on 11/4/24, 8:04 PM

  Is it just me or the way this is described creates visions of American Psycho.

• by mellosouls on 11/4/24, 4:25 PM

  As a dancer I had hoped from the title that the article would be a discussion of the death of dance in clubs.

  It alludes to the record being popular on dancefloors but given that most these days are full of people waving their phones packed tight as sardines, or tiny spaces full of drunks and lechers none of whom can dance in either case, it seems a moot point that it's still popular...

• by cocodill on 11/4/24, 5:04 PM

  Unfortunately, I can't share the general enthusiasm for this song, neither musically nor in terms of how it sounds. The only thing that is quite good is the part of the video with her transparent sweater.