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].
Isn’t this the same fundamental technique as Spatial Audio and binaural Atmos rendering? AirPods can even measure your personal ear transfer functions.
I experimented with OpenAL when Apple developed an implementation and it was unfortunately quite buggy. There were obvious threading hazards visible in the code. It was fine for toy/demo usage but it wasn't fit for production.
It looks like OpenAL on other platforms was used in various games though.
The whole The Seduction of Claude Debussy album by Art Of Noise is _sublime_. (For the art, I don't even recall if it does anything interesting stereophonically...)
They're pretty much only known for "Oh Yeah" which was used in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", but their albums are full of fabulous stereophonic productions.
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.
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.
My dad was into music, so we had a decent set up with turntable, cassette, 8-track, and even reel to reel. I’m very thankful that crappy Bluetooth speakers were not a thing growing up. I had full speaker cabinets with sub, mid, tweeter for rich full sound. I also had lots of time where I was the only one at home and could push those speakers to release the full potential of songs.
Volume makes a difference to be sure, but full wall of sound vs loud earbuds are totally different experiences.
There's no shortage of crappy modern audio hardware, but compared to like a bedside clock-radio, or an 80s economy car, a decent bluetooth speaker is actually an upgrade, and something like a HomePod (that costs around $115 in 1988 dollars) is revolutionary.
Which is not to say you couldn't find a Hi-Fi system from that era that would put a HomePod to shame, but it was the sort of thing only rich people and music geeks would have access to.
Reminds me of listening to all the OG wave dubstep on YouTube in the late 00s and not getting it, until I plugged in a bass amp I was borrowing and vibrated my walls.
It is amazing that there are entire genres of music like space bass that rely on sub bass for the whole experience, and it's pretty much impossible to get the same experience without a good subwoofer. Good headphones can get close but lose the visceral feeling of the sub in your body.
As a millennial with auditory speech processing difficulties, going back to old tracks on modern gear is always a treat. There’s entire instruments I just could not pick up on when I first heard the tracks years or decades ago, that my modern headphones or BAS (Big-Ass Speakers) bring out so clearly and cleanly, all from the exact same lossless file from the exact same CD I ripped at the time.
Now I need to go back and listen to Vogue again, it sounds like. Totally not complaining!
even a half-decent sound system was the kind of luxury I (or my parents) wouldn't have splurged on
It's not just the sound system that is the issue, in fact, it's usually the least of the problems. Speaker placement + listening room are the main problem. Quarter decent would do as well. Anything which isn't complete crap and has separate speakers, which could easily be found 2nd hand for cheap when we were young, is sufficient to bring out most of what is in songs like Vogue (it was after all also produced to be played on average systems). But that requires that instead of the "let's just place 2 speakers next to the amp and we're done" some basic care is taken wrt speaker placement in relation to room shape.
I figured this out by accident when I was about 10, having spent all my savings (like 50$ or so) on a 2nd hand old (think 70's) amp + speakers: I couldn't wait to play something on my system so unloaded it from my dad's car, outside in the garden, soldered a cable to go from my walkman to whatever input the thing had, turned the thing on and was blown away. Like listening to new songs. Simply because I happened to place them roughly the way I saw on pics in magazines, and eleminated any reflections because I was in the garden. So even though by todays' standards the raw reproduction capabilities i.e. frequency response of the system was very subpar, simply making the stereo work roughly correctly and having some bass with it, makes a huge difference. Hence after moving the system into my bedroom there was again disappointment because it was not quite as good anymore. Though after some experimenting it was still waaaaaay better and more resolving than anything I heard before (except headphones maybe, but that's a different thing wrt stereo imaging and bass), including my more wealthy family's rather expensive systems simply because they were all just dumped in a room.
Every so often when I was younger, I’d do the same with movies, buying and setting up a nice surround sound system to get the spacial effects just right. Every time I would thoroughly enjoy it until rearranging/relocating and not making it a priority to acquire and set up a new system.
Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon was that for me. There was always a worn out cassette of it kicking around somewhere and even that played on a shitty little boom box was good.
When I finally got a really good setup at home and gave it another listen, it was almost as if previously I had read about the record and now I'm hearing it.
What recording artists managed with the technology of the 70's is pretty impressive.
Yep. On that note I'd like to remind younger readers that CDs were still very new at the time of this album - many people had still never heard a digital recording so listening to this album in particular on a decent CD system was magical.
I actually had an original Discman and partially credit listening to this album on that as part of what led me to spend (probably too large) a chunk of my adult life DJing clubs and raves.
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.
I don't know, I always thought it sounded simplistic, cheap and dated, even at the time. Placing stuff in the stereo field has been bog standard music production since the 70s. Q sound adds a _little_ bit to it, but somewhat importantly if you are actually listening to this song in a dance club it's all completely lost, a lot of clubs don't have any kind of stereo separation.
Just compare it to stuff that was coming out of the acid house scene at the same time (yes i know this song isn't really acid house -- but it does have a lot of fun stereo effects):
Some cool stereo effects, but not something I'd ever want to listen to. I don't see anything interesting about putting nature sounds and a Pink Floyd sample over a very repetitive electronic loop. Maybe I didn't get far enough, since it's 20 goddamn minutes long. To me, Vogue is ear candy. De gustibus!
A lot of stereo/3d stuff translates differently to each listener. Q sound might not work for you the way it does for others (none of the 3d sound stuff seems to work for me).
Yeah I agree as an electronic music fan the idea that this track is particularly special in terms of digital stereo even at that time seems weird to me.
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.
Same for google music. I wonder if the author meant stage right, or if they had something swapped. (It matches my memory of the CD version but I don't feel like pulling the CD pile out of the basement for this.)
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.
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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...
On the other hand psychoacoustic techniques have not changed.
Deleted Comment
It looks like OpenAL on other platforms was used in various games though.
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
They're pretty much only known for "Oh Yeah" which was used in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", but their albums are full of fabulous stereophonic productions.
For example "The Race" from 1988:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C62NSn-3hU
This entire album called "Flag" kicks ass. It's a weird ride of thrilling electro and comedic bathos. Every song is different.
https://www.qsound.com/demos/virtualbarbershop_long.htm
Very cool to see it’s from the same company!
Volume makes a difference to be sure, but full wall of sound vs loud earbuds are totally different experiences.
Which is not to say you couldn't find a Hi-Fi system from that era that would put a HomePod to shame, but it was the sort of thing only rich people and music geeks would have access to.
I hadn't realized how much I missed that sound quality over the laptop and headset sound I've been listening to for years.
Deleted Comment
Now I need to go back and listen to Vogue again, it sounds like. Totally not complaining!
It's not just the sound system that is the issue, in fact, it's usually the least of the problems. Speaker placement + listening room are the main problem. Quarter decent would do as well. Anything which isn't complete crap and has separate speakers, which could easily be found 2nd hand for cheap when we were young, is sufficient to bring out most of what is in songs like Vogue (it was after all also produced to be played on average systems). But that requires that instead of the "let's just place 2 speakers next to the amp and we're done" some basic care is taken wrt speaker placement in relation to room shape.
I figured this out by accident when I was about 10, having spent all my savings (like 50$ or so) on a 2nd hand old (think 70's) amp + speakers: I couldn't wait to play something on my system so unloaded it from my dad's car, outside in the garden, soldered a cable to go from my walkman to whatever input the thing had, turned the thing on and was blown away. Like listening to new songs. Simply because I happened to place them roughly the way I saw on pics in magazines, and eleminated any reflections because I was in the garden. So even though by todays' standards the raw reproduction capabilities i.e. frequency response of the system was very subpar, simply making the stereo work roughly correctly and having some bass with it, makes a huge difference. Hence after moving the system into my bedroom there was again disappointment because it was not quite as good anymore. Though after some experimenting it was still waaaaaay better and more resolving than anything I heard before (except headphones maybe, but that's a different thing wrt stereo imaging and bass), including my more wealthy family's rather expensive systems simply because they were all just dumped in a room.
When I finally got a really good setup at home and gave it another listen, it was almost as if previously I had read about the record and now I'm hearing it.
What recording artists managed with the technology of the 70's is pretty impressive.
I actually had an original Discman and partially credit listening to this album on that as part of what led me to spend (probably too large) a chunk of my adult life DJing clubs and raves.
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.
Just compare it to stuff that was coming out of the acid house scene at the same time (yes i know this song isn't really acid house -- but it does have a lot of fun stereo effects):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qexS5hBB1C0
Some of the sounds are clearly behind me, to my sides, or surrounding me. And things move around.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGvFObnwKNc
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.
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