cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Phoebus is a step backward compared to DX

WILDCORE
Level 7
Sound goes analog with 7.1 channels from my audio card into my amplifier. PC runs under Windows 7 64bit.

At first i was really impressed from the crystal clear but warm sound the Phoebus delivers and how I was able to play a game with 7.1 sound and having Dolby Home Theater upmixing a 2.0 audio file -played through winamp- to 7.1 as well. This is something I was waiting for, for year. Asus is the first company realizing this with the Dolby Home Theater integration. Bravo!
But later I found out that:
- It does not upmix any 5.1 source to 7.1*. Not games nor movies. No matter if I use mkvs or Blu-Ray Discs
- It does not upmix 2.0 flash videos to 7.1*. Not from the browser nor any media player, but 2.0 avi movies will be upmixed with the same media player
- If you plug a headphone in, you do not get 7.1 from the game downmixed to Dolby Headphone by your hardware. You get 2.0 from the game "upmixed" to Dolby Headphone. You can tell audio directions can't be so precise that way compared to downmixed 7.1
But the worst of all is that all these missing things my almost four year old Xonar DX card can do! Sure, I have to manually adjust the input channels everytime they cange, but I rather have this funtionality as a fall back.
This one new feature and the nice sound I mentioned above are not outweighing the missing ones

So I would like to see these missing functions back added into the drivers.

*as advertised in the manual page three and on Dolby.com (see Tab Technologies)
26,651 Views
21 REPLIES 21

Operation_Nadet
Level 7
Perhaps it is all still in the future, because the Phoebus can even more than now. It is located on the bad drivers
Mainboard:ASUS +6H
GPU: GTX 1080 Auros Gigabyte
CPU: R5 1600X stock
PSU: Be quiet straight power 10 500W
RAM: Trident Z DDR4 3600 @3,2 Ghz CL16

LunarMongoose
Level 7
WILDCORE wrote:
- If you plug a headphone in, you do not get 7.1 from the game downmixed to Dolby Headphone by your hardware. You get 2.0 from the game "upmixed" to Dolby Headphone. You can tell audio directions can't be so precise that way compared to downmixed 7.1


Can anyone else confirm this problem? I can't find any mention of it anywhere on the internet, and the Guru3D reviewers said the headphone surround worked fine, so I'm a little skeptical, but this would be a deal-breaker for me if it were true.

LunarMongoose wrote:
Can anyone else confirm this problem? I can't find any mention of it anywhere on the internet, and the Guru3D reviewers said the headphone surround worked fine, so I'm a little skeptical, but this would be a deal-breaker for me if it were true.


Well, the surround with Xear in Phoebus is about the same as Dolby Headphone on previous models. What you get is virtual surround of 7.1 when using 2.0 headphones, so it won't sound as precise as true 7.1 surround, unless you had a headphone that was compatible with true 7.1 (such as perhaps the Razer Tiamat). I can admit that I've never really liked virtual 7.1 surround.

LunarMongoose wrote:
Can anyone else confirm this problem? I can't find any mention of it anywhere on the internet, and the Guru3D reviewers said the headphone surround worked fine, so I'm a little skeptical, but this would be a deal-breaker for me if it were true.


I'm guessing he is right. On the DX, you can set the incoming and outgoing channels. For example, you can set incoming audio to 5.1 and the DX will downmix it to 2.0 headphones. On the Phoebus, windows just sees the headphones as 2 channel speakers and you are unable to change it. I'm guess that games will only send 2 channel because of what windows says and then the sound card upmixes it to virtual surround.

thetruth1983 wrote:
I'm guess that games will only send 2 channel because of what windows says and then the sound card upmixes it to virtual surround.


Thanks for the reply! It didn't seem like anyone was ever going to chime in on this. 😉

Upmixed surround is terrible and I have no interest in it, but I love Dolby Headphone... Can't you just manually select 5.1 in the audio options in each game with headphones plugged in?

p.s. - Never seen or heard of that Tiamat before. Very interesting...

LunarMongoose wrote:
Thanks for the reply! It didn't seem like anyone was ever going to chime in on this. 😉

Upmixed surround is terrible and I have no interest in it, but I love Dolby Headphone... Can't you just manually select 5.1 in the audio options in each game with headphones plugged in?

p.s. - Never seen or heard of that Tiamat before. Very interesting...


Unfortunately, someone with more experience in this would have to give a definite answer to that question. I do know that in some games (Alien vs. Predator and Assassins Creed revelations), you are unable to change the number of speakers being used. AVP is a 7.1 game so if windows is setup for 7.1, AVP will automatically play from all the 7.1 speakers. I'm guessing that in games where you can change the speaker options (like BF3), Windows will downmix it to 2.0 headphones before it even reaches the sound card software. This is just a guess though since this is just from my own observations. I do have to say that I have tried the virtual surround with DHT and it does give a good sense of direction even when being fed a 2.0 signal.

cx-ray
Level 12
I did some testing. The OP is correct. At this point in time the Xonar Phoebus doesn't perform any type of multi-channel down mixing to stereo headphones.

Any game that only allows you to set a default sound device, i.e., not allow you to specify the number of channels with a headphone connected, will only output in stereo. The sense of positional audio will have to come from the game itself. The Xonal Phoebus will NOT provide that.

In other words, unless the sound engine of the game itself reverbs the sound, you will not be able to make the distinction of an enemy approaching from the front or the rear. No Dolby Home Theater v4 or XEAR virtualized 5.1/7.1 from stereo will ever change that. It's physically impossible.

So I guess the next question is whether or not this will be fixed in a driver update.

cx-ray wrote:
I did some testing. The OP is correct. At this point in time the Xonar Phoebus doesn't perform any type of multi-channel down mixing to stereo headphones.


Thanks for the testing, dood!

thetruth1983 wrote:
So I guess the next question is whether or not this will be fixed in a driver update.


Anyone wanna join in and submit the bug report form on this? Heh.

Unfortunately it means I'll probably have to buy a DX instead... sigh.