Oh shit you're right. :O it shows that my legacy is from Home-Cinema and Hi-Fi, I'm lucky my magazine's EIC doesn't follow GAF or I'd get so much flak (well deserved, lol) you can't even imagine... Oh wait my magazine folded in December after 40 years in the biz, not a problem then
That sucks, sorry to hear it
Out of curiosity, what did you do there? Did you get to play with the gear? A part of me would absolutely have loved to work for an A/V magazine! Hell, I used to live and breath them back in the day.
In my prior job I used to travel ... A LOT. First thing I'd do after unpacking at the hotel would be to head to the nearest Borders or B&N and grab some mags I didn't have a subscription to. It was practically a ritual. Since I was getting per diem, I didn't feel bad dropping the $8-10 on a single issue of some foreign press; yours, WhatHiFi, Home Cinema Choice, HiFi Choice, etc.
I really liked that the UK press was serious about audio quality, especially affordable audio. In the US, there were basically two categories of gear magazines. The ones that catered to home theater, where I'd argue audio is secondary to video ... and the dedicated 2-channel magazines that catered to insanely high-end users. There was a pretty serious whole for quality 2-channel (and arguably surround) audio at affordable prices. Granted much of that was a reflection of what components are available in the US ... which in turn is a reflection of US buying habits (unfortunately). I'm jelly of how many great electronics and speaker companies are over the sea.
Anyway ... that shit
KEPT ME ALIVE during all my time away T_T
What if they use something like Dolby Digital Live? Btw, I think Nintendo paid Dolby some fees to officially support DOLBY Pro Logic II (even tho we know, given how it works, it wasn't necessary).
Regarding DD Live, I'm not sure if that's even around anymore? Based on Wikipedia, apparently that's how the original XBox did DD. It appears to be dedicated silicon in the soundcard, and happened to be in the XBox's chip (called SoundStorm). I may be wrong but I think nowadays consoles no longer have dedicated soundcards? Pretty sure it's handled via the CPU (or GPU maybe). With that in mind, I definitely can't see Nintendo springing money for extra HW. No way.
As for DPL II, I'm quite sure the licensing costs are minimal versus AC much less the new codecs since it's such an outdated tech. In reality, there is no such thing as DPL II encoding IIRC. As with most codecs, the encoding tends to rarely change (for obvious reasons) ... it's the decoding that improves over time. DPL II, like the original DPL (or even older - Dolby Surround), uses the same traditional four-channel Dolby Surround encode used for cinemas and home since the 80's. It's what a 'Hi Fi' VCR supported. They've just improved the decoding end over the years, and added new (unrelated) features like producing multiple channels from traditional stereo, etc.
So when Nintendo et all where advertising DPL II, in reality they were just encoding 4-channel content that can be decoded by any generation of Pro Logic. II just happened to be the then current offering so Dolby had them use that in the literature.
That's got me thinking though. Imagine if Nintendo
doesn't license it? That would mean for a large number of users ... their games will actually have
worse audio than their prior generation consoles.
LOL
