SSX Tricky DTS is 4.1 (no center channel) (1 Viewer)

[John Kilroy]

A poster who apparently is playing the game on a decent system is reporting pretty negatively on the sound:
"There is no sound information in the center channel at all, not to menion there is very little LFE effects under 55Hz (I checked) so to say I was let down a bit is an understatement. There is a lot of activity in the surrounds but this game has some of the most unnatural pans of any surround software I have ever heard....ugh!
The pans around the main channels (during flybys, NPC dialog, sound effects and such) are jerky and imprecise. This is to be expected as there is NO CENTER CHANNEL ACTIVITY( ) to assist with the placement of those pans, but what I didn't expect is that the flyby pans in the surrounds were JUST AS CRAPPY...double ugh!
This game has the most flashy, garish and unnatural surround sound I have ever heard, so much so that I had to switch DTS off as it was just getting on my nerves (the mix is too bright and harsh too)."
This was posted at gaming-age.com.
John Kilroy
(who thinks DD5.1 is more than enough for videogame sound)
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[Gary King]

This is what I expected when EA announced DTS surround sound.
The problem with panning isn't the lack of a center channel, it's the lack of HRTFs. It soundas if rather than implementing fully positional sound on the PS2 (not a very easy task, so it's understandable), EA just created a set of pre-positioned sounds for every effect that needed to be in surround (back left cheer/back right cheer/front left cheer/front right cheer) and just mixed those in varying amounts to come up with the surround stream. Since doing full HRTF is very expensive (although the result would have been fine in 4.1), the end result seems unnatural.
That's how *I'd* do digital surround on the PS2.