iOS games and 5.1 sound

By sockhopsinger, 9 May, 2013

Forum
iOS and iPadOS
Greetings: I am curious if there are people out there who have hooked up their iOS device to their surround stereo, whether it be 5.1 or 7.1 sound, and tried to play some of the iOS games. If so, can you recommend games that work well over a 5.1 surround system? Hope this makes sense. Thanks again, and happy gaming. Scott

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By BrianSchmidt on Sunday, May 5, 2013 - 10:53

From a technical perspective about the best an iPhone could do for surround sound would be "Dolby Pro Logic II", or something similar--sort of a poor-mans 5.1 Surround. That's because the headphone jack is only stereo (so no cool Dolby Digital 5.1). A game would specifically have to be written to output to Pro Logic, but most of the games that do cool surround things (like Papa Sangre, etc.) are designed specifically for headphones, and wouldn't translate to actual surround sound speakers. A quick search didn't really turn up anything. (but I'll look in more depth later) Is that something that a lot of people would be interested in? I was going to put a "Optimized for Speakers"/"Optimized for Headphones" switch in my upcoming 3D sound game, but decided that people would rarely listen to their iPhone/iPad over external speakers. Brian EarGames

It's an interesting idea. I don't know what made me think about it. I think I was just plugging it in to my stereo the other day so as I could stream music when the idea occurred to me. I doubt it is something that I would use often, but the concept just seemed like an intriguing one to me. Was just curious what other people thought about it, and if anyone knew of a game that could be played through 5.1 surround sound. Looking forward to hearing about your new game that you're coming out with.

HI Brian, Your upcoming Ear Monsters game sounds awesome; can't wait to try it! I actually prefer playing these types of games using headphones, but I haven't come across any audio-based game developed for 5.1 surround sound either. :-) I've also been curious if it were possible to get 5.1 surround sound output out of an i-device. It looks like this might be possible through use of an Iphone HDMI adapter, or maybe through Airplay.

You're correct- You can get 5.1 digital surround out of an iPad/iPhone via HDMI or Airplay. So if you're watching a movie from your iPad and have it hooked up via HDMI, and that movie contains a Dolby Digital soundtrack, it should work fine. But for interactive apps (games, etc), there's no way I'm aware of for the game to put out a Dolby 5.1 signal. There's a special technology needed to do that and to the best of my knowledge, it's not available on iOS. (that's the technology we put into the Xbox--in a previous life I was the audio architect for Xbox and Xbox 360). I'll see if I can dig up some more info on that... Brian

Hey since you are doing iOS games, how bout a baseball game that us blind peeps can play? :