EAX

Without further ado, I realise that I must get back to posting on my blog… you know, get rid of the cobwebs and so on. Let me start off with something that many of use, but never actually notice. It’s sorta like under the hood stuff.

EAX stands for Environmental Audio Extensions (but some people like to call it Environmental Audio Effects). Now smart alecs will have figured out at least a general idea of what this is. If you haven’t, work on you IQ. EAX is used to deliver more lifelike sound, mainly in games and movies. Lifelike in the sense that the sound accurately represent what’s going on in your game/video. Lifelike means it should make the game immersive. Put you in it, got it?

EAX consists of 2 main components – the 3D positioning part and the reverbation component. 3D position works really well if you have surround speakers that surround you – like a 5.1 or a 6.1 speaker setup. For more on speaker setups, refer to my earlier post. EAX will do the normal ‘routing sound to the right speaker thingy‘ and also try to give sound from other speakers with accurate representation of reflection fo sound. As in the sound from other speakers will be softer, echoish and all.

The reverbation component is used to model the environment of the movie scene/game. For example, if you’re in a cave in a game, EAX will cause the sound to reverbate to sound like you’re in a cave. There are over 30 such environments included in EAX 2.0.

However, EAX is modelled using your sound card and not your processor. So you’ll need to have a compatible sound card to take full advantage of EAX support in your application. But that’s not exactly a big problem anymore. I got an Asus A8N-E motherboard, with an integrated Realtek sound chipset, which supported EAX. However, using the latest driver from nVidia (which provides the chipset for the A8N-E) caused EAX not to work. Heck, certain games like Halo couldn’t even usemy 4.1 system. Only front speaker! I switched to the original drivers from Realtek, and everything worked fine.