With the data that they received from the microphone, Sony was able to accurately measure how sound works in a multitude of different ear types. Sony fixed many microphones inside of people’s ears and exposed them to sounds from a setup of 22 individual speakers while rotating the person. There’s a lot of technical stuff as to how they made this work, but I will keep it pretty simple in this article.

The Head Related Transfer Function or HRTF is a process within the Tempest Engine that was purpose-built for this exact reason. set out to develop a method to measure various shapes and sizes of ears and how they react to different types of audio. The biggest advantage of having a dedicated audio engine built right into the PS5 is that you won’t have to rely on audio technologies inside TVs or soundbars to produce good quality game audio.Īccording to the PlayStation 5’s technical director Mark Cerny, the real challenge in developing the Tempest Engine (and by extension, 3D audio) was ensuring that it sounded great on all ear shapes and sizes.Ĭerny and co. Sony has even gone as far as to say that you can even feel the position of a single raindrop that hits the ground! The Tempest Engine has enough processing power to handle loads of sounds originating from various points within a 3D world. Sony and AMD have essentially created a GPU for audio– in the broadest sense of the term. Just like how a graphics card can generate 3D models of video game worlds, the Tempest engine can do the same with audio. The Tempest Engine is made in collaboration with AMD and is essentially a standalone chip that is inside of the PS5 that handles all things 3D audio. But Sony has taken it upon themselves to build their own proprietary audio engine called Tempest. What’s the Tempest Engine?Īlmost every other hardware manufacturer that dabbles in 3D audio uses a licensed audio technology like Dolby Atmos. This is probably why Sony has invested in developing their brand-new 3D audio engine for the PS5.

While 3D audio is being used more and more in various forms of media, the area it mostly stands to gain is with video games.

For the purposes of this article, 3D audio and spatial audio are the same. There are some differences between 3D and spatial audio, but you don’t really need to concern yourself with these technicalities. What the heck is 3D audio?ģD audio or spatial audio is specialized audio technology that is used to allow listeners to pinpoint both the direction and distance of a sound. So, it makes sense why their 3D audio solution for the PS5 would drum up a lot of hype.įor the uninitiated, these words probably mean very little in which case you should probably keep reading to find out why 3D audio is the next big thing. Their 360 Reality Audio is an immersive surround sound format used in their TVs and headphones. Sony’s no stranger to developing new audio technologies. With the launch of their next-gen console, Sony announced that the PlayStation 5 would have a completely revolutionized 3D audio solution that would change video game audio forever.

Playstation 5 headset