Re: [Flightgear-devel] Engine sound problems with Lightning

[AJ M. <aj-...@ad...>]

On Mon, 01 Oct 2012 17:47:54 +0100
James Turner wrote:

> The correct solution is to have multiple mono sources (which all sound are, in reality) and appropriate source locations. That will accurately give the positional cues, wherever the listener is located - inside or out, looking at the acft from behind or the front. I'm not sure which sounds you are referring to specifically, but assuming they relate to engine startup, then one would expect each engine to be a separate positioned source, and generate its own version of the start-up sounds.
> This is exactly what OpenAL and the sound-manager are designed to accurately model, btw.

Yeah, I know the theory... but in practice, for this kind of all-enveloping sound even a semi-reasonable stereo recording (which, admittedly, none of the current Lightning recordings are) is far more convincing/realistic than trying to model the exact positioning of the sound of each engine and its path to each of our ears.  In reality, sound doesn't come straight from the source to our ears, it's reflected and re-reflected and absorbed by all sorts of surfaces round about us.  The place I miss stereo sounds most is in glider cockpits - where are you going to position the sound of the wind rushing past the canopy, fuselage etc?  It's bound to just sound mono and dead (I'd be happy to be proved wrong of course!)  Yet a stereo sound clip "feels" right, automatically (better still if L/R channel volumes can be adjusted individually).  Anyway, by the looks of it we can't have that for the reasons Erik mentioned so I'll just have to forget about it. 

Having tried the Lightning though, I also hear what Alan reports and it's not what I had thought - the looped engine sound is indeed quite frequently broken up or interrupted and I have no idea why.  It's not a problem with the sound clip, and even within FG it used to work perfectly - something has changed.

Does anyone else hear that, in the Lightning or in any other model?

AJ

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