Virtual Surround???

[avaserfi]

So I was playing around on my Wii the other day and finally noticed many GC and Wii games are dolby mastered. So I started looking around and found sound options: mono, stereo and surround. Looking online I found that nintendo calls this virtual surround and replicates regular surround. How the hell does that work when the wii has rca audio inputs and nothing more? I thought all that could be done with that was stereo and if you wanted you could run the same sound through your surround speakers.

I turned it on and my receiver was still automatically set to stereo so I switched it to dolby game mode and it sounded just like I thought it would as if surrounds were playing the same as the fronts. Is that all this virtual surround is or is it more than BS?

 

[j_garcia]

Dolby Prologic (Dolby Surround) and now PrologicII are encoded on stereo signals and decoded by the receiver. These are all matrix surround modes and while not as good as discrete, PLII does a decent job of simulating surround. When they say simulated surround on the box, that likely means some proprietary type of matrix surround that should be able to be decoded by most receivers; meaning it is not true PL, but can be processed by a PL decoder or something like DTS:NEO6 or some other stereo decoder. "Virtual surround" often refers to something trying to recreate simulated surround from just the two front channels, but it is hard to say since they could mean anything by it.

 

[Sheep]

I know what you're saying. I was playing MOHAA on my friends Game cube, and there was gunfire behind me, and ONLY behind me. There mixing for those games it really good.

SheepStar