Shenmue IIx in Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround

[BlueMue]

I wanted to ask how many of you have played the Xbox version of Shenmue II in Dolby Digital 5.1 surround and what your impressions are.

I recently expanded my stereo system to 5.1 with a modern (but few years old) AVR and gave Shenmue IIx a try.
I always wanted to hear how it sounds in surround, finally made the jump after years of thinking about it.

I have played the beginning until you get the bag back and then all of the Yellow Head Building.
I have to say that I'm rather dissapointed, Shenmue IIx has pretty lame surround mixing. The surround speakers do add a bit of "room" in areas like the sewer under Kowloon, where there's a lot of reverb, you know.
They rarely give off discrete sound effects though. In the intro you can hear the pidgeons fly past the camera but that's a rare example.

The center speaker is pretty much never used at all. The entire front field is produced by the stereo speakers. Combined with the weak surround speaker output it really doesn't give much more impression then stereo.

The only time the game produces real 5.1 sound is during the rooftop cinematics. The voices are of much higher quality then anywhere else in the game and they actually come from the center speaker. You can hear the chopper behind you, the music coming from the front and then you hear Dou Niu to your right, where he's holding Wong.
After the fight, when the chopper flys over you, the subwoofer gives a nice punch. Works and sounds quite well but that's only a fraction of the cinematic action in the game. Maybe the final scene with Shenhua will be mixed good aswell but I don't remember it having those exceptional clear voices so I kinda doubt it.

It's really rather sad. There really wasn't much effort or passion put into the surround mixing of Shenmue IIx.
Guess that goes well together with the dub... It's really a shame as the Xbox can do a lot better and Shenmue II definately deserves a nice 5.1 sound in every cutscene.

[shengoro86]

I haven't tried S2X in 5.1 surround. I'm sad to see that it isn't that great either.

[BlueMue]

Has no one else here ever played the game in surround?

[Yokosuka]

How have you connected the Xbox to your 5.1 system ? By an optical cable ?

[BlueMue]

Yes, I have an RGB cable that has an optical out on the connector that goes into the Xbox.
Video (over scart) goes straight into the TV and audio into the AVR.

[Yokosuka]

Well, I didn't even know Shenmue IIx has dolby digital 5.1 (I guess it was necessary if you wanted to publish a videogame on their microsoft system), that's good news for me.

Coz, I don't remember any Dreamcast version had it (which are based on ADX stereo technology or something like that). That could explain why the surround looks so poor in this game like you well described it in your post but it's just a supposition.

My expectations were never really high anyway, the sound and the music look so compressed and cheap in Shenmue, as much as a classic Virtua Fighter.

Look at Mirror's Edge, Dead Space, Uncharted, etc. All these modern games benefit of an outstanding sound work, really similar of an hollywood movie on the condition you use a good sound installation.
That would be class if the next Shenmue could have at least the same kind of sound spatialization of a Rockstar game. But we're talking about japanese here, I dunno if they take traditionally as much attention as the westerners about this aspect of the game.

[shengoro86]

My expectations were never really high anyway, the sound and the music look so compressed and cheap in Shenmue, as much as a classic Virtua Fighter.

I'd like to challenge this statement.

The audio format used in Shenmue is compressed but it doesn't lose much quality, if any.

Also, you can't "see" sound and music

[BlueMue]

The music that's done by the AICA is crystal clear and sometimes it's hard to believe that it's just based on samples and generated in realtime. The music that's streamed of the disc can also sound good but they didn't quite use the best quality for the music in the intro of Shenmue and during the rooftop cinematic in Shenmue II. Especially the latter sounds very scratchy and compressed. But the Shenmue Theme in the outro sounds perfect.

The Dreamcast can actually produce Dolby Surround via Pro Logic. It's actually implemented into the hardware natively, so no fancy programming skills are needed. But for some reason Sega decided to not pay Dolby the license fees and it's not officially stated in the specs. Very few games do have Dolby Surround though, like NHL 2K.

But it doesn't matter if the DC can do it or not and if Shenmue II was only Stereo. That's no excuse for the Xbox port not to have propper DD 5.1 throughout the whole game or at least for all of the cutscenes.

[BlueMue]

A small update here.

I just finished playing through the Xbox version from beginning to end. The final scene in the cave does have propper 5.1 mixing aswell where voices come from the center speaker and you can hear the light beam and fire travel through the room, coming out of all the speakers.

I have to say again that the surround speakers do enhance the feeling in areas where there's a lot of reverb.
But I expected more. That you can really hear the people on the street chatter behind you and so on.
Well at least I now have finished playing the game like that and experienced it in a somewhat new way.

[shengoro86]

With the tools we have for the audio in Shenmue, could we make proper 5.1 ourselves?

I wonder if it could be done. Not sure if we can freely mux audio channels yet.

[BlueMue]

I bet this would be some tough job even with good tools. Would be great if it turns out possible but I doubt this is manageable.

[BlueMue]

I got a Hauppauge HD PVR Gaming Edition for cheap. It's old and doesn't have HDMI but it allows to record Dolby Digital through a Toslink in. It works great and I was finally able to capture the 2 key scenes of the game that have true 5.1 sound.

Unfortunately Youtube doesn't do the footage justice. I know it can handle 5.1 sound somehow but I haven't been able to recreate the experience of watching the video file. It just does some wrong fake surround with the center and right speaker switched around and no real use of the rear speakers.

So for now I'll just uploaded an AC3 file with just the surround sound of the first half of the rooftop scene for you to check out. Can be played with VLC. You obviously need some kind of surround setup connected to your computer.
With stereo you won't hear any voices except for one short bit of Dou Niu yelling from the right speaker.

http://www.filedropper.com/rooftop

[Ziming]

Not many have noticed this but the Xbox version plays the wrong music during the Langhuishan cutscene.

Xbox

phpBB [video]

Dreamcast

phpBB [video]

[Sonikku]

But Ziming noticed.