Audio?

After reading the 5th "OMG Look at teh graphix, This screen is missing shadox" thread today I had started thinking. What about audio? No one plays with there T.V.s on mute. As gamers we are are just as emmersed in the sound effects as the visuals whether it be beeping and boping or the most realistic gunshots. Yet we never see comparisons on audio between multiplats, yet these "graphix" threads are left right and center. I'm thinking that sound quality is in this order PC>PS3>360>Wii>PSP>DS>MAC:P. PS3 is better than 360 mostly because of uncompressed audio. What's your opinions?

LPCM is a non-compressed format, and is what the vast majorty of sound files on ALL the non-handhelds platforms use..

This stupid "PS3 has uncompressed audio so it sounds better" stuff needs to stop. Most audio clips in games are so short in length that there isn't much point in compressing them (especially when decompression of both lossless and lossy formats requires CPU time.) It's usually only music tracks that get the lossy treatment (and even then many of them aren't compressed.) Explore some of the game files in PC titles if you don't believe me..

Also, sound files in PS3 games are not encoded in anything more than stereo (2 channels) ..unless they're audio tracks of video clips. The sound engine in a game handles the audio mixing and outputting to multiple channels (which can be upwards of 5 channels)..that multi-channel audio track stuff is actually for movies. It's required in movies because, unlike game engines, a Blu-Ray player does not mix audio in real-time (there's no point in mixing real-time when you can master a multi-channel audio track in a studio beforehand. Perspective is non-dynamic in movies..unlike games.)

sound is very important. poor sound kills the games. fear is still the best, the small things in it like when you hit a can on the floor are incredible.

it is strange how many pc games support 5.1 and 7.1 while ps3 only does 2 channels. the uncompressed sound on ps3 is nothing but a joke. 95% of pc games use uncompressed wav files.

I care for sound as much as I care about graphics.

I love MGS4 with my system, pure awesome.

I care for sound as much as I care about graphics.

I love MGS4 with my system, pure awesome.

Uncompressed audio usually sounds no better than properly Lame encoded 256kbs mp3 files.lhughey

Ehh....change "MP3" to "AAC" (at that same bitrate) and I'll agree :P ..I hate the MP3 format (it should've died as soon as AAC matured), but if I have to use it, I'll always go with 320 CBR.

My entire digital music library is actually ripped to lossless (TAK), but I'll be the first to say that the better lossy formats sound pretty much the same with a high bitrate.

The primary reason I like having my music in lossless is because I feel better knowing my audio is a 1:1 copy of the originally mastered source. Mainly what that means is I can transcode my library freely to any format without having to worry about the significant quality degredation you can see with Lossy-->Lossy transcoding.

And yeah, as someone said above: sound quality depends mostly on a game's sound direction and sound engine -- not so much the platform itself. Maybe the PS3 does have better sound hardware than the 360 as you said, but I honestly wouldn't know.

My Denon is decoding PCM and it's not even debatable that the sound quality is better on the ps3, as compared to my 360. I won't even mention the Wii. The 360 has no selectable options, for anything better then Dolby Plus. Which is very, very unfortunate.