Hardware Fusion interviews Darragh O’Toole, European Brand Manager for Audio products at Creative Europe. Darragh O’Toole is involved in the full lifecycle of the audio product range at Creative, from product development through to sales and marketing.

Q. Since the release of the Audigy card how have you built upon the surround sound format to achieve an effective 7.1 surround sound experience?

A. Cinema technology has been an obvious leader in defining the channel standards moving from 5.1 to 6 .1 and now 7.1. 7.1 nicely fills the gap in the sound field where you can now hear sounds in pretty accurate 360 degrees without having to wait until they have moved fully to the rear before you realise they have passed you. For Movies, we have added support for Dolby Digital Surround EX and DTS-ES with speaker replication to take full advantage of the 7.1 configuration for 5.1 titles without affecting the original mix.

Q. The Audigy 2 ZS comes with the DTS-ES Discrete 6.1 surround format with the rear channel matrixed into a 7.1 format. Whilst gamers will be able to enjoy true surround sound via the cards DirectSound3D or OpenAL encoder how have you optimized the format to cater for film and music listeners?

A. For Movies, the cards are certified by THX and we include the THX control panel for accurate configuration. Also, in addition to the standard surround decoding, we also allow you to replicate 5.1 rear channels to the sides so you can take advantage of a full 7.1 setup. For Music listening the CMSS algorithms have been in continuous development to make the surround upmix more effective and now we feel we offer a compelling alternative to any other third party upmix technology.

Q. Until a few years ago the DTS-ES encoding format was rarely used by DVD manufacturers, due to the high capacity demands that the audio format required. With the arrival of the lower DTS bitrate DVD manufacturers were able to incorporate both DTS and Dolby Digital sound tracks into their DVD’s. How long do you think it will be before film maker’s start encoding into true 7.1 surround sound?

A. Large industries like film move pretty slowly but if DVD-Audio can be taken as a reference where full bandwidth 24/96 audio is being considered at the recording stage of studio albums, I think we can assume that as capacity and processing power become less of an issue that movie soundtracks will begin to transition to a non compressed format.

Q. Correct me if I am wrong but as far as movies and music are concerned Creative do not appear to clearly specify that the 7.1 format is in fact a 6.1 discrete format matrixed into 7.1 surround. Why is this?