"Oldschool" surround-sound gaming setup

You want "surround sound" gaming so that you can hear the bad guys coming up behind you in your favorite first-person shooter.

Your motherboard came with a surround-sound card built-in, but you don't like the stuff the computer stores are selling; yes it's cheap, and yes, there's a subwoofer, but there's nothing for the midrange and the woofer has loud "mid-base" and no real low end, and phones; there's a bunch of Web sites that say you really don't want surround phones, Zalman makes an expensive pair, and that's it. The stereo stores sell some "surround" receivers, but after two hours with the manual and a remote things still sound terrible. You put it back in the box; it'll seem like a nice wedding gift for somebody else in a couple of years.

So you prowl the junk stores. There's a 1970 Lafayette Quad receiver for $20. It needs a little cleaning, but you've done that to older stuff. Another store down the street has a pair of Klipsch "Cornwalls"; the shop owner prefers the "Heresy" because he has a small house, so you smile and pay him a pittance to help him out an give him back some store space. The second pair of Cornwalls comes from a thrift store; the woofers have some dry rot, but you know that Fostex has finally started selling the "FW-305" woofers in the U.S., and they'll make fine replacements. The last stop, after prowling the phone books for an hour, is a pawn shop that has a pair of Quad Pioneer headphones. An hour to connect it all, unplug the phone, and now it's time to enable "Surround" on your game's "Audio Setup" screen.

The first "Quad" entry was done in October. The knobs were one piece cylinders then, most of the textures were stock POV-Ray textures, which I don't care for but was trying to get it in before the early deadline, and I used image maps for the LCD monitor screen, label on the headphones, radio dial, signal strength meter and burlap back wall then.

When the deadline got extended I really got to work; the knobs have a dozen parts each, most of the knobs have pointers, all of the image maps were replaced by CSG objects, and I made textures by measuring colors of photos and scanning woods and the aluminum side of my PC case for the receiver face.

I re-did the "burlap" back wall about twelve times. the "Final" texture is not my favorite; it's just the best one that works on a 32-bit PC; it seems that there's a hard limit of 4GB of memory that a 32-bit computer can address, regardless of swap files and operating system. This is an instance where I really needed the Grand Prize machine to render a winning entry!

Of the items in the picture, I actually own the Lafayette quad receiver. My speakers are more reasonably-sized 1966 KLH and my headphones are merely stereo Sennheisers, which were a wedding present. The receiver I use in the garage in summer (preferring the heat from a vacuum tube receiver in winter), the KLH's (only a pair) I also use in the garage, and the headphones are for gaming and really good musical pieces at my PC, which has REALLY cheap plastic speakers.

I measured colors of things in photographs and scans using the "Eyedropper" tool in JASC's Paint Shop Pro 4.12; I have licenses for versions 6 and 8 but always fall back to the familiar. I used Microsoft Excel to convert measured colors in the range of zero to 255 to POV-Ray's range of zero to one. All of the submitted renderings were done on POV-Ray 3.6. When I ran out of memory trying to do a better-looking Burlap, I tried POV-Ray 3.5 and MegaPov to see if they could handle the situation gracefully, before reading that any 32-bit computer, regardless of renderer, OS, architecture, physical memory or swap file, was going to run out of memory in this situation.
I beleive that I'd also used Excel to place the knobs on the front of the receiver, but that was before the original October submission date.

quad.zip (624 kb)

Good modelling, but of limited interest for people not knowledgeable in sound technology.