As an audio engineer, I'm VERY excited at the possibilities here.
I really appreciate Cerny's focus on audio with the PS5 and could feel he was also buzzing with the thought of all the possibilities. He seemed genuinely proud and excited, which I loved.
The HRTF solution is interesting. As he said himself, the tech has always worked best when you have your own personal profile created. There are companies that are able to do a pretty solid version of this by simply looking at a video of your ears. I do wonder if they'll eventually offer that as a service so that you can load up your own profile and have the 3D audio be as accurate as possible.
The issue of each user's individual room dimensions, and thus acoustics, kind of puts a weird wrench in how they can calculate 3D audio as the effect will depend on the listening "sweet spot." Like, if you have your couch right up against your back wall, that will affect reflections differently than if you had some space behind you before the wall. The technology relies on altering things like the phase of waveforms in such a way that it tricks your brain into thinking something is really coming from a certain direction. The factors of a user's listening environment could affect the phase of waveforms significantly and thus potentially mess up the 3D audio calculations when listening through speakers. As such, the listening experience may vary depending on: how close one of their 5 HRTF profiles matches the user's ears, the quality of the listener's room acoustics, actual quality of speakers they're listening through, and listening position. My Interest is piqued to hear how well it works out in different spaces and for different people (as the make up of your actual ears matter here)! But I trust Cerny and Co. to get it right and I can tell he believes strongly in the tech.
Beyond that, it really seems like they are nailing this and have thought of a way to bring 3D audio to a broad range of consumers in a meaningful way. For developers, the possibilities are very exciting. I hope people take it seriously. I don't know what audio engineer working in games wouldn't want to take advantage of this in a big way though. As far as the pipeline goes for films and games, audio is often seen as, sadly, less important and this gives it a chance to shine more and show how much it can add to the experience in terms of immersion. An audio team firing on all cylinders should be able to create some really mind blowing stuff now!
Thanks for caring, Sony!
