A3D

For the military aircraft, see A3D Skywarrior. A3D (Aureal 3-Dimensional) is a technology developed by Aureal Semiconductor, and used in their Vortex line of products, that delivers holophonic (three-dimensional) sound through headphones, two or even four speakers. A3D version 3.0 incorporated two core elements, A3Dverb and A3Dspace. The technology uses head-related transfer functions (HRTF), which the human ear interprets as spatial cues indicating the location of a particular sound source. Many modern sound cards and PC games incorporated A3D via license from Aureal. Due to Aureal's acquisition (see below) the A3D technology is now part of the intellectual property of Creative Labs and some features may be licensed under different product names such as EAX.
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<hardware> (Aureal 3-Dimensional?) A technology developed by Aureal that delivers sound with a three-dimensional effect through two speakers. Many modern sound cards and PC games now support this feature.
A3D differs from the various forms of surround sound in that it only requires two speakers, while surround sound typically requires four or five. It is sometimes less convincing than surround sound but is supposedly better in interactive environments. For example, PC games in which sounds often move from one speaker to another favour A3D, while pre-recorded video favours surround sound.
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