The Audio Revolution

Audio fidelity is an often forgotten element of gaming, and the hardware architecture that facilitates it is even less discussed, but now more than ever audio is a crucial element for quality gaming.

Hear gunfire over your right shoulder in Perfect Dark Zero™ and spin with precision to pop a few rounds off at the enemy, not because you saw them, but because you heard them. Excellent game audio is immersive and instinctual, and Xbox 360™ is ready to bring its innovations to bear on the audio experience.

Playlists Standardized
Ripping music to your Xbox® hard drive and using it as a jukebox was innovative. Giving developers the opportunity to employ the playlist features in-game was outstanding. Now, standardizing the practice for every Xbox 360 game is flat-out brilliant.

No longer will a developer choose whether to include the feature or not. It's out of their hands; Xbox 360 does it for you, so listen to whatever you want, when you want, during any part of any game.

DVD Quality
Xbox 360 matches the audio quality available in even the most outrageously mixed DVDs on the market. Put simply, the audio technology is now on par with Hollywood, so the next time you watch an audiophile's dream DVD, you'll get a feel for what to expect from Xbox 360. Think Daredevil (one of the all-time great audio mixes available), any of the Lord of the Rings movies, Star Wars, the Matrix films, and so on.

Flinch at every bonecrunching blow in Dead Rising.

Independent Compression
Xbox 360 also boasts up to 320 independent compression channels. In layman's terms, this equates to a substantial leap in ambient world sounds (birds chirping, leaves rustling in the wind, gunfire from afar on a battlefield), allowing for a much more immersive experience, as more audio can be compressed without the loss of quality.

If you like to think in terms of numbers, munch on this statistic. The new technique (called XMA compression) allows for a compression ratio of 6:1 on the low side and up to 14:1 on the high side. Compare that to the Xbox 3.5:1 compression ratio and you get some idea of its significance.

Get the home crowd rockin' in full surround sound.

The List Goes On
Xbox 360 has also taken strides in creating a development environment allowing for much more flexibility. As Brian Schmidt (audio expert on the Xbox 360 team) puts it, "Xbox 360 is very flexible, allowing developers to more easily create complex sounds that tie in with game actions. The original Xbox audio was very powerful, but harder to customize."

The 32-bit audio processing allows all the processing power needed for excellent range and audio precision, as well as 5.1 Digital Surround Sound for that needed extra element of immersion.

All of which sounds sweet to this gamer.

Article by Alex McLain

• Surround sound systems.
• Xbox 360 cables.