EAX (Environmental Audio Extensions)

» see creative.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

there was a period when the sound card was a component you chose on purpose. it had a price and a chip with a name, and it came with an argument attached. the argument was eax. creative shipped it on 11 august 1998 inside the sound blaster live!, whose emu10k1 processor carried an fx8010 signal processor that could apply reverb to game audio in real time without asking the cpu for anything.

what eax actually was is smaller than the marketing suggested. it was a library of presets bolted onto microsoft's directsound3d, which handled the positioning of sounds in space. eax handled what the space did to them. the first version had twenty-six environments in it, so a developer picked hangar or stone corridor and the card supplied the tail on every gunshot. that is why half-life and unreal tournament and later counter-strike sounded different on one machine than on the machine next to it running the same build.

then windows vista reached consumers on 30 january 2007 with a rebuilt audio stack. the old path had lived largely in kernel mode, where a crashing audio driver could take the operating system down with it, and microsoft moved the mixing into user space and removed hardware acceleration for directsound and directsound3d on the way. nothing was announced about eax. it just stopped being reachable, and games that had been shipping with environmental audio for nine years came up dry and flat on the new operating system.

this one i was in the middle of. in the turkish forums of that period a signature was a parts list you maintained, and the sound card had a line in it next to the processor and the graphics card, because it was still a thing worth naming. the counter-strike years in internet cafes ran from 2002 to 2005, and the machines were not identical in a way you could hear. the audio setting screen in games from that decade had a checkbox for hardware acceleration and one for eax, and turning them on was the difference between a room and a speaker.

~ the record ~

~ what the card actually did ~

the versions tracked the hardware underneath them exactly. eight voices processed in hardware in 1998, then thirty-two by 1999 with occlusion added, which is the effect of a wall standing between you and a sound. version 3.0 arrived on the audigy in 2001 under the advanced hd name, carrying a new reverb engine and smooth transitions between environments instead of a hard switch when you walked through a door. 4.0 in 2003 allowed several environments at once, and 5.0 in 2005 ran a hundred and twenty-eight voices on the x-fi with four effects available on each.

the list of games is a list of the decade. half-life, unreal tournament, splinter cell, rogue spear, doom 3, f.e.a.r. and prey all carried it. so did counter-strike, which is how most people in this part of the world heard it without knowing the name of what they were hearing.

~ the day the sound went flat ~

creative's response to vista was a piece of software called alchemy, released in 2007, which intercepted the directsound3d calls that no longer went anywhere and translated them into openal, an audio api creative also owned. it worked, more or less, on creative hardware only, and it required the user to know that it existed and to add each game to it by hand. a workaround that ships as a separate download and needs configuring per title is not a rescue.

the deeper problem was that the argument for buying a sound card had been the effects, and once the operating system stopped letting a card apply them, the onboard audio chip on the motherboard was good enough for almost everyone. realtek even released a package that let its integrated codecs fake directsound3d back into vista. creative then told developers to stop targeting eax and use openal's efx extensions instead, and by that time relatively few games were being written against either.

~ the long tail ~

creative eventually stopped updating openal as well. what survives is openal soft, an open source reimplementation that is still maintained and still the way old games get their reverb back on modern windows. wine implements a subset of eax so the same games work on linux. the effects that were the entire justification for a hundred-dollar expansion card in 1999 now arrive as a library nobody pays for.

the hardware argument never came back. audio processing moved onto the cpu because the cpu got fast enough to not care, and the sound card became a thing only people with an interest in microphones buy. the strange part is what got lost in the transfer: modern games do positional audio far better than 1999 could, but the specific coloring of eax, the slightly overdone cathedral tail on a pistol shot in a corridor, is a sound that belongs to one decade and one company's chip.

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