727: Xbox 3D Spatial Sound

Larry Hryb:
All right. We have a very special show this week. We are talking all about audio. Audio on Xbox Series X and S, and how things are really evolved over the past few years. We're going to talk about Dolby. We're going to talk about DTS. We're going to talk about Windows Sonic, but more importantly, we need to start with the power of Xbox Series X and S. As I said last week, he's back. Jason Ronald. You're basically co-hosting this show with me. Good to see you.

Jason Ronald:
Good to see you too, Larry. Excited to be back this week.

Larry Hryb:
Yeah. We're going to talk about audio. I talk about this over the years, how audio is kind of this unsung hero of gaming, because it's nothing you can in a speeds and feeds blog post or a screenshot, so I'm really excited to talk about it. Tell us a little bit about how Xbox Series X and S have really upped the game audio game as it were.

Jason Ronald:
Yeah. Spatial audio has actually been an area that we, as Microsoft, have been investing in since as far back as 2017. We actually added a lot of new capabilities to the Xbox One generation. With the Xbox Series X and Series S, we're really taking it to that next level. One of the things that we did really early on in the design of the Xbox Series X and S is we added a brand new custom audio hardware block so that, as a developer, you can offload all of your spatial processing off the CPU, which is where developers normally would do that work, and this new audio hardware block actually has more computational power than the entire eight-core Jaguar CPU from an Xbox One X. There's a tremendous amount of capability and power available to developers to take advantage to really deliver that transformative spatial audio experience.

Larry Hryb:
And I think it's important to point that we've heard a lot about audio this generation, but people don't even think about ... "Well, of course audio. It's just stereo", but no. We're going to learn a little bit more about that later in the show of the different formats, but there's a lot of nuance to audio in terms of how games use it, where they use it, and it's much different. You'll hear that later on in the show of movies and TV, so that's why we have the special hardware chip. What does that enable us to do, Jason? Having a special chip in there?

Jason Ronald:
When you think about spatial audio, it's really about creating presence in a 3D space, really understanding where you are as a character in that 3D space, and being able to pick up different audio cues, such as there's an enemy behind you or somebody is firing at you from up high, and actually being able to hear that and giving you that sense of where you are in that 3D space so that you can more easily navigate it.

Jason Ronald:
We also think about it from an accessibility perspective as well. There's a lot of games that have done a lot of work. If somebody is visually impaired to be able to make sure that they're still getting that same great gaming experience. They're just using audio cues as opposed to visual cues. A lot of these techniques have existed for a really long time, but as a developer you always had to make a choice; How do I prioritize this versus AI, animation, or other gameplay mechanisms? With this new audio hardware block, developers don't have to make that choice anymore, because they can off load all of that processing to that dedicated audio block, and then just focus the CPU on every other way that they can make the game even better.

Larry Hryb:
One of the areas we were talking about is kind of the surround audio, and there's really three main areas or three main options for Xbox Series X and S. Can you walk us through those? Then, I want to have you kind of explain Windows Sonic.

Jason Ronald:
Sure. First, every Xbox Series X and S comes with Windows Sonic for free, which gives you a great spatial audio experience. It also supports virtual surround sound if you choose to play with headphones. Then, we also support modern non-proprietary audio renders, such as Dolby Atmos and DTS:X. With this new capabilities that we have in both Xbox Series X and S, we can dramatically increase the number of sound sources, have hundreds of active sound sources, all interplaying with one another to really give you that immersive experience that we're all looking for.

Larry Hryb:
We talked about Windows Sonic, and that is something, as you said, that's free out of the box, so people should have this enabled anyway. It really helps create that sound field for different games, right? That's something that's available on head phones, in your sound bar, or your surround system, right?

Jason Ronald:
Exactly. It works with any set of headphones that you have, so you don't have to go out and buy special headphones. We can create that virtual surround sound experience in your headphones. Then, for people who have, say, higher end audio set ups or maybe they have an audio visual receiver, where they have Dolby Atmos or DTS support, you can go ahead and use those as well. Those work both in a home theater set up as well as with headphones.

Larry Hryb:
Yeah, and what you need to do is I've got it up here ... It's actually my console. You just go into sound here, and over here you'll see there's your format. As Jason said, you've got Windows Sonic for headphones or Dolby Atmos for headphones, so they're all right here. We're going to talk a little bit more about Dolby and DTS X headphones later on in the show. You should always just go down and hit Windows Sonic, and you'll kind of up-level your audio experience, right Jason?

Jason Ronald:
Exactly. That's why it was really important for us to have a three option available to everybody, but also allow those premium options for those people that really want that best in class experience. As you said, spatial audio tends to be more nuanced. Different people like different effects, so that's why we want to offer players choice in how they want to experience their games.

Larry Hryb:
I also want to point out that you kind of stated a little earlier ... Xbox has a long history leveraging the experience in Windows of audio in gaming, and really kind of a best in class. Would you say that's right?

Jason Ronald:
Exactly. We've been working on this since 2017, and we partnered with Microsoft Research on new techniques, like project acoustics as an example, which was a really transformative experience that actually shipped in Gears 5. Now we can take that even further. Then, we also partner with teams like HoloLens with the development of custom HRTFs to really deliver that great spatial audio experience. When we think about all the capabilities that we have in the Xbox Series X and Series S, it's really the culmination of work across all of Microsoft to really deliver that great audio experience.

Larry Hryb:
And we certainly have seen these amazing audio experiences over the day. For instance, one of my favorite games recently to do it or a while ago was Hellblade, where you had this amazing binaural sound. It felt things, and they were in your ears, so that's certainly an extreme, but there's also a lot of other nuances that you play. You mentioned, "Where's the enemy over there? Where's the door over there? Where are the voices coming from?", so there's so much to audio that people should not underestimate. The audio team that we've done work on the platform is pretty powerful, and it should not be ignored this generation, right Jason?

Jason Ronald:
Exactly. For us, the exact same audio hardware block that exists in an Xbox Series X is the exact same one that is in the Xbox Series S, so it's the exact same great [inaudible 00:07:45] capabilities. This is also an area where we've really worked very closely with the middleware partners all across the industry so that it's easier, and more developers are able to take advantage of this without doing a lot of custom work on top of the already tremendous amount of work they have to do to be able to deliver their games.

Larry Hryb:
Yeah. We talked about Windows Sonic. Why don't we take a break here, and I want to talk to the folks from Dolby, and I want to talk DTS. Then, we're going to talk about headphones, and then do you mind if you wait a second? We'll come back, and you and I will kind of wrap up at the end?

Jason Ronald:
Sounds great.

Larry Hryb:
All right. Let's fire it in. Now let's take a listen to Dolby and then DTS. When it comes to audio, people know the name Dolby, and joining me today is Spencer Hooks, who is the director of gaming for Dolby. Spencer, thank you for joining us today.

Spencer Hooks:
Hey. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

Larry Hryb:
This whole show is on audio, so I'm really excited to talk to you guys. I'm a big fan of Dolby over the years, and it's great to have you here. Tell us a little bit about you, your journey, and how you ended up being the director of gaming for Dolby, because that sounds like a cool gig. I thought I had a cool gig. That sounds pretty cool.

Spencer Hooks:
It is pretty cool, yeah. It's been a fun journey. I've actually been at Dolby for 21 years now, which is kind of amazing even to me even though I've lived it. I joined the company as an engineer and was working on how we bring our products to DVD and things like that. Then, over the years, as the company grew, because we've grown a lot since I had joined, I had a lot of opportunities to try different things at the company, and I eventually found my way into product management and was a product manager for games. It was a dream job for me then. That was back in 2008, and it's still a dream job for me now. I love working in games at Dolby. I'm passionate about audio and really am lucky enough to work with game developers and cool partners like Microsoft. Yeah, it's been a fun journey.

Larry Hryb:
Like I say, you and I have grown up in ... I've been in the games' industry for 20 years, so it's been fascinating to see the growth, as I'm sure you have. It's interesting, because you say 2008. To me, that's almost the tipping point. I remember being with 360, where it just became so mainstream. All these other companies were looking and going, "Oh. Wait a minute. Gaming is getting ..." Certainly Dolby was tracking it for so long, but it's just so great to hear that was kind of about the right time when you said, "Hey. We should do something here", right?

Spencer Hooks:
Yeah. That's when I joined gaming. We've actually been doing gaming longer at Dolby. I was peripherally involved, but it wasn't my main focus. We've actually been working with Microsoft on gaming and bringing innovative audio technology to gaming since the introduction of the original Xbox, so that was a time when 5.1 audio first came to games. It's something that Dolby and Microsoft pioneered together, and we've really had this incredible partnership over the years where we've brought innovations to the market. It's been a really fun journey and a fun journey with Microsoft. We've done a lot of cool things together. I remember back when Halo 2 had a limited edition version of the game. This was back when surround sound was still pretty new to games, and they had a surround sound check DVD in the box set. We actually worked with Bungie to create this surround sound check that featured characters from the game.

Larry Hryb:
[crosstalk 00:11:16] I believe it was the Grunts, wasn't it?

Spencer Hooks:
Yeah. Exactly. It was Grunts and a Hunter who would kind of dance around and do the channel check. It was a really fun project and a lot more exciting than hearing pink noise going from left center to right channel.

Larry Hryb:
We've all heard those.

Spencer Hooks:
Yeah.

Larry Hryb:
I wanted to get you in here today to talk about the audio on Xbox Series X and S. I have Jason on, who just was opening the show with me. We were talking about having a specialized audio chip and the power in there. What has Xbox Series X and S been able to do for Dolby and for you guys in terms of being able to unlock some potential?

Spencer Hooks:
Yeah. It's an incredibly powerful platform. Dolby Atmos is all about bringing these rich, immersive experiences to players, and doing that by delivering audio in this three dimensional space that really transports you into the game and gives you the information you need as a player to react faster. This has been a really great platform for us to be able to deliver that experience. Whether you're playing on a home theater system, like an AVR with 7.1.4 speakers all around you, on a sound bar, an Atmos-enabled TV, or even on headphones or a headset, this is the perfect platform or us to deliver this experience. There are hundreds of millions of devices out there that feature Dolby Atmos, and we're super excited that the Xbox Series X can be a way to connect players to those devices and really deliver this ultimate gaming experience.

Larry Hryb:
You talked about the audio, and I've got this little graphic here that you sent over. This is stereo and then this is surround, for those people that can't ... Then, explain to folks what Dolby Atmos is, because this is really interesting. Even though you only have a couple of speakers and headphone's case around your years, you're able to kind of synthetically create this fear of audio. Is that accurate?

Spencer Hooks:
Yeah, that's right. If you think about the way that we, as humans, hear ... you only have two ears, so you see people online saying, "We only have two ears. You need to have multiple speakers around you" or "You can't even do this, because you only have two ears." The truth of the matter is really that our brains use these two inputs that we have, our ears, to really understand what's happening around us based on the impact that our head and the shape of our ears has on the sound as it arrives into our ears. By understanding how we hear, we have a team of scientists and researchers that are really the best in the world at what they do. By really understanding how human beings hear and the way we perceive sound, light, and other things, we can create technologies that allow us to simulate the world around us using just a standard pair of headphones.

Larry Hryb:
Yeah. To your point, we've got this graphic here that shows like, "Here's Dolby Atmos on the left, and stereo on the right", and it's important to point out that the most advanced audio processor is the brain. When you hear the sounds, you talked a little bit about it, we can show things are left and right, but also very, very specifically in positions, right?

Spencer Hooks:
Yeah. That's exactly right. With Dolby Atmos, one of the key things you get is this enhanced precision. You get not only sound all around you, but you get much more precise location of that sound, and that is really a big deal to gamers. Hearing is actually our fastest sense, so we process sound much more quickly than we can process images. As a gamer, that means that a cue in sound can actually be really important in me understanding what's happening around me in the game.

Spencer Hooks:
Not only that, but sound is not just limited to a little square in front of me. It's actually happening all around me from the game, so I get these cues of things that are happening all around me. We've actually done our own testing though our science team, where we brought in some esports players and actually had them compare Dolby Atmos for headphones with stereo. We rendered a sound off screen and had them located it and shoot it. What we found is that they were actually able to do that 100 milliseconds faster with Dolby Atmos than they were with stereo. I think for somebody who's not a gamer, that doesn't sound lik such a big deal, but to a gamer that is a huge deal. That is a lot of time, and that's actually six frames at 60 frames per second that gives you a real advantage.

Larry Hryb:
One of the areas also that we talked about ... We talked about game audio, and we're going to talk about through the whole show, but you talked about the history of working with Bungie and a lot of other games as well, but you guys aren't just like, "Okay. Give us the game audio, and let's figure it out." You actually work down to the development tool levels, so it's a rather deep integration to a lot of the game development process, isn't it?

Spencer Hooks:
Yeah. We started this journey with spatial audio about a decade ago when we were bringing Dolby Atmos to the cinema. It launched in 2012 with the movie Brave from Pixar. At this point now, every major Hollywood studio is releasing their biggest films in Atmos. Streaming services like Disney+, Netflix, and others are releasing movies and shows every week, so there are almost 3000 now available. We saw from the very beginning that this was a technology that really lent itself perfectly to games. We saw that the ways spatial audio is produced is basically by thinking about a three dimensional space and putting those sounds in that space exactly where you want them to be heard.

Spencer Hooks:
In a game, that's how you make a game, right? If you're making a game like Halo, you've got this three dimensional world, and you're naturally putting those sound emitters in that world in a way that it used to be that would end up being flattened down into 5.1 or 7.1. Now you're basically unlocking those 3D sound, and being able to connect it to an Atmos render so that you get that experience that was kind of there under the hood the whole time. We worked really closely with Microsoft, and also we worked super closely with game developers to make sure that they have the tools they need to enable them to deliver that experience. The key thing for us as a company is really that we create technology to empower content creators, and to empower game developers and game studios to deliver that creative vision.

Spencer Hooks:
Yeah. We work really closely with them to make sure they have the tools that they need, and that's something we've been really excited to partner with the Xbox-ATG team on, and be able to make sure that, "Hey. Everyone's got the tools they need. They can really unlock that creative vision and deliver it to gamers in the way that they want to." The Xbox Series X is an amazing example of the tools that companies like Microsoft create to do that. You've got this amazingly powerful CPU, GPU, fast memory, fast storage, and an amazing spatial audio system that is all there in service of delivering this amazing experience to a gamer. It is this kind of intersection of art and science, and that's really where Dolby lives too. We are all about this intersection of technology, emotion, and storytelling.

Larry Hryb:
Now, here we are. We've got the Xbox Series X. We have Dolby Atmos available on it. You can go to the Dolby app, and you can go through and get it ready for your headphones, sound bar, or your TV. I happen to have an LG TV, which has Atmos in it, and then I've got a Sonos soundbar here, which has Atmos. What should people look for this holiday and beyond frankly? We're not going to theaters anytime soon, not that we would play games there, but what should people look for in terms of kind of the headphones and so forth. What kind of experiences do you enable in the console?

Spencer Hooks:
Yeah, so you've got a great set up there. Those are two great products that we're happy to be a part of with Dolby Atmos.

Larry Hryb:
Well, three if you include the Xbox Series X.

Spencer Hooks:
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. This is actually the perfect time to check out Dolby Atmos. With the launch of Cyberpunk 2077, that's a game that supports Dolby Atmos. We are super excited about that. To celebrate that, we're doing a free weekend of Dolby Atmos for headphones this weekend on Xbox. It's kind of like your free play days that you do, so actually anyone who has the Dolby Access app this weekend and is playing will get a free weekend of Dolby Atmos for headphones. This is a perfect time to check it out. All you need to do is get the Dolby Access app. This is an app that is on the Xbox store.

Larry Hryb:
There it is.

Spencer Hooks:
It will walk you through how to set up your system, whether you've got a home theater or you want to listen on headphones. It includes some demo content, so you can see, "Hey, what is the ultimate demo look and sound like?" There's some animated content there. You see some clips from our partners at Blizzard. Yeah. It's there to really help you get set up and understand what that experience can be like. It also lets you customize the EQ and set up for your headphones, so you can set up exactly like you want. There's presets for movie, music, and gaming, of course. There's some custom ones that you can set up there to really tune for your headphones if you want to. It will work with hundreds of millions of Dolby Atmos-enabled devices or, of course, any pair of headphones that you plug into your controller or connect wirelessly to your console. Like I said, it will walk you through that set up. The connection to a home theater system is free. Dolby Atmos for headphones is normally $14.99, but like I said this weekend we're having a free weekend, so everyone can check it out.

Larry Hryb:
There's no reason not to check it out. You talked about you're partnering with Cyberpunk, but it will work with all your games, any game you've got in there, so go swing over. If you're a Game Pass subscriber, and you should be, swing over to download some of those great Game Pass games, like Gears of War. Check that out, because that has an amazing sound field as well, doesn't it?

Spencer Hooks:
Yeah. That's an Atmos game. There are a number of Atmos games on Game Pass. Now that you guys are delivering Game Pass is pretty amazing, and there are some amazing experiences you can get from the games that are there.

Larry Hryb:
It's really exciting to see where audio is going. Later on in the show, we're going to talk to Scott Weber from our accessories team. He's going to talk all about headphones. It's really exciting to see, as you and I have grown up or seen the industry mature, to see all of these great products. We've got an amazing and embarrassing set of headphone choices, audio choices, and video choices. We haven't even touched on the other part which is, and you kind of alluded to it in the app, Dolby Vision. I'll have to get you on for another show to talk about that, but the audio options are just incredible. Dolby continues to lead the way on that, so I'm just so excited to have you on the show. Thank you for coming in and sharing how you guys think. Anything you want to add before I let you go?

Spencer Hooks:
No. Thank you so much for having me. You talk about embarrassment of riches, we are thrilled to have those same kind of embarrassment of riches in our partnership with Microsoft. It's been a great one, and things that you guys do are really amazing, and we're so grateful to be a part of the Xbox. I would encourage the gamers to check out some of these amazing experiences on Xbox Series X, and this weekend is the perfect time, as I said, because you can check out Dolby Atmos for headphones for free this weekend.

Larry Hryb:
Thank you for that, Spencer. Again, I always thought that I had the greatest job, but being the director of gaming at Dolby ... I've got to tell you, that rivals my gig. That's fantastic. Great to chat with you. Great to meet you, and have a great holiday.

Spencer Hooks:
All right. Thanks. You too.

Larry Hryb:
Continuing on with audio, DTS is a name that you may know. Joining me on the line is Michael Kelly. Michael Kelly, you are a senior engineer there for DTS. Welcome to the show.

Michael Kelly:
Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

Larry Hryb:
First of all, I'm thrilled to chat with you. As everybody knows, I'm an audio nerd, and I would argue that you're an audio nerd as well. Tell us a little bit about your background in the game space, working in the audio part of games?

Michael Kelly:
Oh wow. I've had quite a weaving path through it. I guess I've been a gamer since I was about eight. I dabbled in programing, learned to program really on an Amiga. I didn't believe there was much of a career in that. I went to university-

Larry Hryb:
[crosstalk 00:24:15] At least that's what your mom probably told you, right? That's what my mom said, the same thing.

Michael Kelly:
Yeah. I get a lot of mileage out of telling her what my job is these days. Yeah. I went to university, did a degree in music technology, and then really loved what I was doing. I did a PhD in spatial sound. Again, trying to think of where that might take you in the career world, open to a lot of ideas ... There's some very kind of specialist companies around at the time. A lot more of those now, but really I was just really lucky in the right place at the right time. I'd always been interested in games, sound design, and how games are made.

Michael Kelly:
I dabbled and kind of done some of my own public domain stuff as well. I got this opportunity to work on Broken Sword at Revolution Software as a sound designer. They were entering crunch. There wasn't much of the game there at that time, and they were really trying to get together with the sound. I think the composure at the time realized there was a lot to do as well. I did have skills in the area, got into that, did some sound design, and then really it went from there. I think what I found was when I was going for interviews for sound designer jobs, people were saying, "Oh. You can program as well. Why do you want to be a sound designer then? There's a lot more money in programming."

Michael Kelly:
I was like, "I don't know. It's not exactly why I'm into this." Yeah, so from there I ended up working at Creative Labs on the sound blaster technology particularly for mobiles phones or cell phones.

Larry Hryb:
That's interesting, because a lot of people certainly know Creative Labs from dropping the sound card in their old PC back in the 90s, but they probably don't think about it from a mobile phone perspective, because it was all bleep, bloop, bleep, bloop back then, right?

Michael Kelly:
Right. That was the thing at the time. There was really no smart phone. I remember Crave actually, at the time, owned the MP3 market as well. There was no iPod. Then, we heard about this Apple thing coming up. I was at Creative when that happened. We were like, "Oh. Do we think this is going to change things?" At the same time, smart phones we already saw on the horizon to a degree. Gaming was becoming interesting at that time. I think, as part of Creative, there was a standard for mobile OpenSL ES kicking around. OpenAL is the audio equivalent of OpenGL. OpenSL ES was, let's say, the mobile version of that.

Michael Kelly:
There was already lock in towards this kind of standardization for 3D audio in the mobile market as smart phones were evolving. That was creative stake in that to look at where their technologies could apply and other domains beyond the PC. I think that was what taught me, maybe more away from the games themselves, into the direction of the technologies on the platforms. From that, that's when I ended up working for Sony, and it was a real pleasure to work with the talented bunch of people working on the platform level audio for PS3 Vita. Just before I left, I think we were getting in PS4 at that time, although no one ever talked about that at the time. It was very early days.

Michael Kelly:
Also, my research background was along the lines of audio codec and objects-based audio codecs, which didn't exist at that time. It all came full circle really to DTS, where I was asked to come and help build out the headphone rendering for the object based audio codec they were working on, which we now know is DTS:X. In parallel, it brought together all my kind of understanding of object-based rendering of audio for games as well, so a bit of codec, bit of audio, bit of spatial reproduction, and a bit of interaction. Since then, a lot of interaction with the games' industry and some direct work with game developers too. I am in a rare position that I got to use all my different background in one place. I count my blessings every day, I guess.

Larry Hryb:
That's a great journey. Thank you for giving us that time capsule. Here we are, DTS ... DTS, which you can kind of see behind me. I've got it up on the console. You can get this on your Xbox. Tell us about what it means for people that enjoy audio, what DTS is and kind of the journey of DTS. A lot of folks don't know this, but DTS has a very interesting beginning. Tell us about the beginning of DTS, if you would just a little bit.

Michael Kelly:
Yeah sure. It is interesting. Steven Spielberg was apparently working at the time on this major dinosaur film, and no one had done anything like it. We all now know that film was Jurassic Park. He was looking to bring the audio to the same groundbreaking level they'd done with the visual, so he got these giant dinosaurs. He wanted people to sit in the movie theaters and experience the film and audio in some way-

Larry Hryb:
Which, by the way, I have to say I just watched it. Those effects still stand up today, 25 or 30 years later, so it's pretty groundbreaking, to your point.

Michael Kelly:
Yeah. It really was. I watch stuff with my kids now, and it's embarrassing sometimes the stuff that we would have thought was amazing at the time, and it doesn't work anymore, but Jurassic Park holds its own. It's incredible. I wasn't in DTS at the time, but my understanding was the cinema codecs at the time couldn't really carry the level of base and magnitude as well as the whole surround environment that was needed for a film of this gravity.

Larry Hryb:
And especially when you have dinosaurs. I mean, you need that based, because the, "Boom. Boom. Boom", right?

Michael Kelly:
Right.

Larry Hryb:
You want to have that moment or those moments.

Michael Kelly:
I think one of the ways to save audio data is to drop sounds that have less value or less meaning. I think at the time, LFEs, low frequency effects, were used for kind of tricks, but I think there were fundamental for carrying the sound or the gravity of the dinosaurs. Like I say, I'm not speaking personally here, but I understand there was a [inaudible 00:30:11] in there looking for some new technology to fill it, and thus DTS was formed. Our mantra has always been about quality and fidelity of it since. That's the beginnings.

Larry Hryb:
That's quite a beginning. Then, here we are many, many years later. We've got DTS on the console. What is DTS? Tell us about what DTS means for gamers, people with the headphones on, and kind of that progress? A lot of people may hear a lot of different audio codecs. I want to give you a chance to kind of talk about DTS proper.

Michael Kelly:
Sure. I think there's two key aspects to the technologies that are relevant to Xbox. The first one really comes back to our bread and butter, or our original bread and butter, the DTS codec. On the Xbox DTS ... In fact, on all Blu-ray players, DTS is the mandatory form. If you burn a Blu-ray, it has to support DTS sound and it has to carry the soundtrack in that way. Again, along the lines of Blu-ray was a high resolution format that wanted a high data and high quality codec to go with it, and we were very fortunate to be selected as the mandatory format. Xbox with Blu-ray players is always supported. DTS decoder is out of the box. The upgrade for Xbox One and Xbox X and S is that we also support DTS codec. Every Xbox comes with the DTS decoder built into it for Blu-ray playback, but the advantage for gamers now is that also if you go and download the Sound Unbound app, which is a free app, then as part of that app, you get the DTS.

Michael Kelly:
Exactly, yes. I don't make this [inaudible 00:31:48]. You get the DTS:X Encoder. If you have a high end speaker system, if you've got an audio video receiver, or a soundbar that's branded DTS:X, then you will get the benefit of object-based audio coding. All the kind of positional audio that was encoded into the game by the game creators will carry through, and you'll get a full cinematic audio experience through your home AV receiver. We're also very conscious. Not everybody has a home AV receiver. Not everybody wants one. Not everybody wants to fill their room with speakers, so the other offering is the Headphone:X technology, which brings all that objects-based, high quality rendering to your headphones, whatever head phones they are as well, so whether they're Analog headphones, digital headphones, USB headphones, or whatever, both on Xbox and Windows. The Headphone:X technology is a paid for technology, so through the app you can then buy an app add-on, which its base price is $19.99. That's how you get access to that technology, but the core DTS:X Encoder is free as part of the app.

Larry Hryb:
Got it. As you go through, and you've been in games for such a long time as I have, when you talk to folks in the other parts of DTS, who work in music, movies, and whatnot ... I mean, I know how it's different. I'm sure you do. Explain to the audience how gaming audio is perhaps slightly different within maybe some linear storytelling movies.

Michael Kelly:
There's a lot of key differences. I think some of them don't necessarily relate to what we do, but the interactivity is clearly the difference there. The fact that when you're scoring a movie, you know exactly what the move looks like, and you can record a linear score. You can put an orchestra, and you can almost just record it in time with the way the movie's being played out. Again, we don't know how long the play is going to hang around in a particular section, so the music has to be designed or broken down in such a way that it can be adapted across the game and kind of line up with key cues. That translates down to the sound design as well.

Michael Kelly:
Every line of dialogue has to be recorded properly 15 different times in 15 different ways so that you don't hear the same line of dialogue when you do the same thing. There's all that kind of stuff. From our point of view, it's a lot more to do with the mixing and the interactive mixing. In a movie, you'd typically know that you have a target play back environment. You know someone's going to listen to the movie in 5.1., and if they don't, maybe you mix it, a stereo variation of the soundtrack as well. The thing that games have always done is, because of the fact they have to break the sounds and the music down into these small sections, and then reproduce them at run time in response to what the player is doing, then you also need to render them in 3D in real time. All the effects need to be added in real time, so this is CPUs that a Blu-ray player wouldn't need.

Michael Kelly:
The key thing is that all these individual objects can then be rendered at run time to the positions they're supposed to be exactly. It's not, "Oh. Well, we want this roughly from the back, so it's going to come through the back speaker." Sometimes it will be between the back speaker and the side speaker. The game engine has to know how to do that. What's kind of interesting is movies have headed more in that direction. Codecs like DTS:X and Dolby Atmos have exposed that kind of thinking about composition and sound arrangement to move sound mixers, so it's kind of interesting. That's where my experience helped with DTS a little bit. We had some of that in-house, but I think trying to bridge that gap between how games and movies were doing things and the sort of convergence between the two, it's quite an interesting time to join an organization.

Larry Hryb:
Yeah. To your point of linear storytelling, which is we know exactly how the movie is going to get cut, what scene, and this is when the dinosaur is going to show up over in that direction when we're sitting in a theater. With gamers, you're right ... We don't know if they're going to go through that door in five seconds, out the window in a minute, if they're going to go up or down, if they're going to turn, or which way they're looking. It's so much more complicated.

Michael Kelly:
[crosstalk 00:36:00] You don't even know if they're going to walk through the door backwards. Now, all the sounds that you thought were in the back are in the front. These are trivial things within games to deal with now, but they're the kind of things, I think, you've got to think about, particularly if a sound design is coming from that world. It is a different cal of fish. You've got to really just break everything down to its bare bones.

Larry Hryb:
I know I need to let you go in just a moment. Before I let you go, when you're working in audio for so long, has it been exciting for you to see how audio has become a first class citizen? In the old days, it was like, "Oh. Look at this screenshot", and then game looks great, but that doesn't translate very well. Certainly, now with some YouTube videos, YouTube available, and whatnot, but it feels like audio is finally getting its proper treatment through a technology like DTS:X.

Michael Kelly:
Yeah. Absolutely. It's a real pleasure. I think audio has always been a very big part of the experience to me, as an early gamer. I think what really made audio in the time was the soundtracks. The effects were what you could get away with. Now, to look at the budget that's spent on orchestral soundtracks and truly immersive things, and then that's just on the kind of technology, energy, and creativity that's thrown in. What's great is the array of very artistic games that are coming out, that kind of take audio, turn it on its head, and look at different ways to use games as a medium. It's not just something to fill the gap. It's what use called a shopping list thing. "This gun has to have a gun shot sound." It's got its own life.

Larry Hryb:
Right. Yeah. It's really been interesting to see the development there. Before I let you go, DTS ... People can get it right here on the console. As you said, they just go to the app. Try it out with a good set of headphones, and it's just beautiful to have that type of experience. By the way, I always like to ask gamers, because I know you're a gamer ... What are you playing right now? What have you had a chance to play?

Michael Kelly:
Two. I've got Valhalla, which I'm one of those people who's still waiting for my Xbox X, so I stopped playing it. I started getting into it, started enjoying the scenery and just the amazing resolution ... Not resolution. The whole quality of the landscape. I thought, "I need to wait. I need to see this in 4K", so I put Valhalla on hold and switched over to Watch Dogs. I loved the first Watch Dogs game. I missed the second one, so very excited about this one particularly.

Larry Hryb:
It also takes place in London.

Michael Kelly:
[crosstalk 00:38:26] That's what I was going to say. Valhalla is in England. This is in London. There's a theme here, but I don't just play British-related games. That's what I'm excited about. I think I remember when The Getaway came out for the same reason. To go and see sites you know can be quite exciting.

Larry Hryb:
That sounds great. They're both great games, and they look fantastic. More importantly, they sound fantastic, so I think you're going to enjoy that. Michael Kelly from DTS, I appreciate you coming by and telling us a little bit about DTS technology on Xbox Series X and S. Thanks again for your time.

Michael Kelly:
Absolutely. It's a real pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.

Larry Hryb:
All right. We learned all about the codecs, and now you're saying to yourself, "What headset do I get?" Well, Scott Weber is here. Scott runs our third party accessory team and works on the third party accessory team. You deal with a lot of the headsets. Scott, welcome to the show.

Scott Weber:
Thanks for having me. Good to be back.

Larry Hryb:
Yeah. You had your [inaudible 00:39:20]. We were talking about it, before we get started recording, we had you on quite a while ago, and it's great to have you back because there's a lot of changes in the head phone space, obviously in terms of the updates. You're going to show off some of the items that people can get their hands on if they really want to get into the audio space with their games instead of just having it come out of the TV speakers. Then, you're going to kind of walk us up to the different levels, so let's jump in, get started, and talk about third party accessories and great head phones for Xbox Series X and S.

Scott Weber:
Yeah. Let's do it. I've got some headsets here that we can walk through if that sounds good?

Larry Hryb:
Let's do a little show and tell, shall we?

Scott Weber:
Let's do it. Let's start off here with the ASTRO A20. We've got a number of headsets that are coming out this holiday, all of them awesome. We're choosing to show off a few of them. Today, this is the ASTRO A20. You may know ASTRO. Look at that. He's got the box right there. I don't have the box for this one. He says, "I've got the box in the back. Just give me a second."

Scott Weber:
These are awesome. If you know ASTRO, you know that the bill quality is just incredible on these things. The A50 has really been their premium headset for a long time, but it is at a higher price point. The A20 comes in at $119.95. This is one thing I just love about these. I'll just put these on over my existing headphones here. It's got flip-to-mute, which is always big, but I love when you can flip to mute and you really get that tactile sort of feedback. You can hear a click that goes up to that upper tier there that really lets you know that you are indeed muted, and no one in your party chat can hear you talking to the pizza guy.

Larry Hryb:
[crosstalk 00:40:57] I haven't checked the A20s, but some of the ASTROs, even when you mute, give you an audio cue that is actually muted as well.

Scott Weber:
Yeah. It's really, really nice. They've done a great job with that. These headsets, of course we're talking about spatial sound, they're ready for Atmos, they're ready for Windows Sonic, they're ready for DTS, or whatever. They're great. These are wireless headsets as well, so it comes with a USB dongle that plugs into the back or the front of your console if you like.

Larry Hryb:
Wow.

Scott Weber:
I also love the flexibility on these too. We talked about durability. You can really see these go here with this nice rubberized headband here. Yeah. It's super comfortable with the cloth cushions and over ear design. ASTRO has made great, great products for a long time, so we love this. 15 hour battery life on this guy too, which is really amazing.

Larry Hryb:
Scott, before we get going too much, I want to talk a little bit about this. Tell us about the programming. People walk into a store and they see "Designed for Xbox." What does that mean? Tell us a little bit about that program.

Scott Weber:
Sure. Design for Xbox means that it comes through our program. In order to be a licensed partner, you have to sign an agreement with us That means that we're going to give you access to our testing tools, and we're going to make sure that every single product that has that badge on it is a verified, great experience for Xbox. That's especially important when you think about things like Xbox Wireless, which actually have to communicate directly with the console.

Scott Weber:
We have a number of technical requirements that we have to go through and help partners develop those so that we make sure that your audio is not dropping and that you're getting clear audio the whole way. We also test it for things like fit and finish and durability too. Talking about ASTRO and what they've been able to do there, that's important for us. We have a number of test criteria, so any time you see that badge, you know that it's gone through us. We've tested it across, not just Xbox Series X and S, but we go back to Xbox One, and we keep this continuous compatibility across generations now, testing against former and future console builds too to make sure everything is working great.

Larry Hryb:
Now, before we get going, you mentioned something. We talked about Xbox Wireless, and I know in a previous show we had you on, you talked about that and how it's a much more robust technology than Bluetooth, which is a great technology, but we decided to go a different route for lower latency and higher performance, right?

Scott Weber:
Yeah. Xbox Wireless is really the most premium wireless experience we can offer on the console. It uses the exact same radio as the console, so you pair it once and it's set. You're not having to worry about any sort of interference you would get with other Bluetooth devices. I think anyone that's gamed with Bluetooth knows that there is some lag and latency that you can have there, even if you're playing a mobile game with a Bluetooth headset. It's not quite right. We love the technology. We have a number of partners that have taken advantage of it. It's just so nice to be able to grab your headset, turn it on with your controller, and just be ready to go. You've got your gaming set up all good to go with crystal clear audio that supports all these great surround sound options.

Larry Hryb:
All right. We looked at the ASTRO A20. What's next? What else do you have there sitting on your desk?

Scott Weber:
Let's hop into the RIG headsets right here. RIG has been a partner of ours for a long time. You can see the RIG 700HX. I'll just ahead and unbox that. I don't know how much of this I can catch in the frame. RIG is a wonderful partner of ours. They have a number of headsets that are really excellent. The 700 is one of my favorites. It really leans into the ultra lightweight gaming experience, so if you feel like you're not loving the gaming experience with the heavier headsets, then this is one that is just ... I mean, I just pull it out of the box, and it's a feather. It weighs nothing. Before we get into it too, the great thing about this too is that this one actually ships with a two-year entitlement to Atmos. Normally, you'd have to go and get an entitlement to that elsewhere, but these RIG headsets actually come with one in box.

Larry Hryb:
Right. That's actually a big bonus there, because ... Ow. That's kind of rough to hear. That plastic.

Scott Weber:
Yeah. I know.

Larry Hryb:
Sorry. Sorry folks. Yeah, that's a big help there. It's nice to have this option where you could just plug it in. Excuse me, just kind of connect it, unbox it, connect it, and then you can use that code to get your Dolby Atmos action going on here. Let's take a look at those.

Scott Weber:
There we go. No more plastic. Apologies of that. This actually has a detachable mic too that you can see as a part of this. I'm not going to subject everyone to the plastic crinkling again. The 700, like I said, it has this nice kind of comfort band right here, your classic band that you have here. You put these on, and they are just so light. The thing that I like about these headsets too is that with a lot of headsets, I feel like when you're talking when you're in a chat, you really feel like it's hard to hear yourself sometimes, because it's so immersive. You can really hear your own voice with these, which is really great. This does have a mute button on it as well, and you can see it has the volume dials and everything else here. This also is flipped to mute too when you attach the mic.

Larry Hryb:
And that one's completely wireless?

Scott Weber:
This is wireless, yeah. This is a USB dongle that plugs into the back of your console and does wireless like that, so it's not the Xbox Wireless experience. We have one of those coming up in a second.

Larry Hryb:
Got it, so that's actually something new. We haven't seen a lot of those before, where they're using external dongles where some of our partners are using external dongles. What does that afford people, in terms of is it flexibility? Tell us about that.

Scott Weber:
Yeah. It's just a different solution. A lot of partners actually started doing that before we made Xbox Wireless available, as it was a technology that we really started to roll out two or three years ago. Some partners have elected to do that. It's just a preference. If you'd like to have a USB slot freed up, you can go with the Xbox Wireless or the dongle base. Both work great. Of course, with the badge on it, we make sure that the audio is perfect either way.

Larry Hryb:
Perfect. There you go. What else you got there?

Scott Weber:
That's the other one.

Larry Hryb:
I need more plastic crinkling.

Scott Weber:
Yeah. Exactly. Then, we can take a step up here. In frame, right there. That's the RIG 800LX. This one really takes a big step up in terms of a feature set, which is awesome. With the 800, you really get double the battery life actually. The 800 has incredible battery life. It's got 24 hours of battery life.

Larry Hryb:
That's one straight day of gaming.

Scott Weber:
And lord knows when Cyberpunk comes out, some of us are going to need it, right?

Larry Hryb:
That's right. Yeah.

Scott Weber:
This one also comes with the Dolby activation card right there for your two year subscription. I am going to mute for one second while I crinkle a bunch of plastic and take this one out.

Larry Hryb:
All right. Go ahead and do that. What Scott's doing is he showed us some great, great headsets right now. Of course, I have the A20s that I have right here. He showed those off a little bit earlier. Really, what we wanted to do was we wanted to show you the depth and breadth of accessories available for Xbox owners. That's kind of what Scott's going through. He and his team kind of go through, and there you go, Scott. You can unmute now if you want.

Scott Weber:
Yeah. Sounds good. Sorry about all the crinkles.

Larry Hryb:
Wow. Look at that thing, huh?

Scott Weber:
Yeah. The first thing you see is this has a sling band on it right here. A little bit different style for comfort. These have always been a personal favorite of mine, because they really feel like nothing on your head. It's a design aesthetic that some people like, and I personally love it. I feel like it never really clamps down on the top of my head, which is just amazing. You know with this, the primary thing for me is just that 24 hour battery life. It's really, really incredible.

Larry Hryb:
And how do people charge it though? Is it just a micro USB or USB-C on the side there?

Scott Weber:
Yeah. There's a micro USB port that's right there too. Both these headsets too have adjustable mic monitoring as well to make sure that you can hear yourself and know that your party can hear you too while you're in chat, so it's really good. The 800 also has some preset EQ settings as well that you can go through and adjust for the type of game that you're playing.

Larry Hryb:
What's the price point on that one again?

Scott Weber:
The 700 is a $99.99 headset, and the 800 is $149.99.

Larry Hryb:
Okay. We're working our way up there. All right, so what else you got over there? You've got to show me a little bit more, don't you?

Scott Weber:
I do. Let's talk about Xbox Wireless. We talked about that before. This is the Turtle Beach 600, and they're calling this the 600 Gen 2. They've had the Stealth 600 before. This is the Gen 2 version of that, and we'll do a little bit of an unboxing here to talk about Turtle Beach. Obviously, Turtle Beach has been a leader in the audio space for a really long time.

Larry Hryb:
They sure have.

Scott Weber:
One of our first partners that we ever had in the Xbox One era to do license headsets for us, and one of the earliest adopters of the Xbox Wireless technology when it became available. We're super excited about this. They've focused on a couple things here. One thing that they really focused on, and we got a lot of feedback about this, is that not all headsets are comfortable when you're wearing glasses.

Larry Hryb:
That's true.

Scott Weber:
Turtle Beach has really made some focus on this. Oh boy. More plastic. I will zip the plastic off here really quickly, and we can chat through the 600.

Larry Hryb:
Pull the bandaid off, Scott. Pull it off.

Scott Weber:
Just do it. I know. The pressure to just get this off so quickly is really intense.

Larry Hryb:
I want to be clear. We've showed a lot of these in the boxes, but most of these, if not all of these are, are available right now at retailers, right? Available for holiday.

Scott Weber:
Yes. Absolutely. They are available. Here you go. There's the Turtle Beach Stealth 600, and that's actually just got an integrated mic right there that you can see. It comes down.

Larry Hryb:
Yeah, and if it flips up, not even [inaudible 00:51:06]. It's kind of embedded. Oh, that's nice. Yeah.

Scott Weber:
Exactly. This is a flip-to-mute as well. This comes in black as well. I just have the white edition to show off something different here. These are really great. They have independent game and chat volume control on here as well, so you can control your mix of how loud you want to hear your party versus how loud you want to hear your game audio. I know when I'm playing Overwatch with friends, I don't need the game audio to be much at all. I just want to chat with my teammates, which is [crosstalk 00:51:38] kind of cool. Yeah. Absolutely. Of course, these all support the spatial audio options that we talked about. It has audio preset options that are right here as well, and 15 hour battery life on these as well. Really, with all these wireless headsets, we're talking about excellent battery life, so they're going to get you through any sort of session. Obviously as you go up, the battery life continues to get better. That's that.

Larry Hryb:
Awesome.

Scott Weber:
And Xbox Wireless is just a one button push-to-pair with you console, the same way you'd pair a controller. It's a really seamless experience.

Larry Hryb:
You know what I'm going to need from you, Scott, is you can email me, and I'll put it in the show notes. I'm going to give you the links to all of the product pages so that people can [crosstalk 00:52:17].

Scott Weber:
Absolutely.

Larry Hryb:
We're going through a lot of numbers, A20s, 800s, and whatnot, so I want to do that now. You kind of go even higher than the one you just showed us, which is higher than Turtle Beach. Tell us about that one.

Scott Weber:
Yeah. We do. The Stealth 700 right here.

Larry Hryb:
Which I have not even seen yet. I don't even have a pair of those yet. I've got to check that out.

Scott Weber:
[crosstalk 00:52:37] Oh man. I'm excited for this. You know what? There's no plastic on this one.

Larry Hryb:
That's what you get when you work your way up. There's less plastic.

Scott Weber:
Less noise. Look at that. Really premium. I want to make sure everyone sees that unboxing experience right there.

Larry Hryb:
Oh. Look at those. Yeah.

Scott Weber:
You just open that up, and that's got a padded top right there. These are gorgeous, gorgeous headsets, I have to tell you. Turtle Beach did an absolutely unbelievable job with these. A lot of steps up in the 700. The first thing that you'll see here is it's got cool gel-infused comfort, memory foam pads right here. This is really their technology that they talk about. There's more reinforcement here in the band. You see that this has got kind of a metal headband construction in it. The battery life goes up to 20 hours in these. Obviously amazing for an Xbox Wireless headset, and incredibly comfortable.

Larry Hryb:
Yeah. Those look great.

Scott Weber:
These have Bluetooth in them as well, so it's nice to be able to have a headset that can act as your everything headset, I think. This is a really concealed mic here. You can wear these out on the go. You can wear these on the bus in a world where we are on buses again, and take them on planes and stuff like that.

Larry Hryb:
Even take a phone call in a world for those of you that make phone calls.

Scott Weber:
Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. That's really the point is you're able to just take this for your really easy Xbox Wireless experience on the console, and then take phone calls while you're gaming. You can switch back and forth really, really easy. This also has an app that supports a 700 that you can use to get the latest firmware updates on it, just to make sure that you're getting the best performance out of these as possible. You're also able to go in there and adjust some of your sound settings and things that you'd want to do. Yeah. These are wonderful. I haven't actually put these on before, and I'm blown away at how comfortable and cool these headsets are. It's been a long time since I put these on.

Larry Hryb:
Yeah. Are those touch sensitive on the side, or are there dials? I can't really tell from what you're showing us.

Scott Weber:
Yeah. Let me flip this around and show the dials right there.

Larry Hryb:
Oh. There we go.

Scott Weber:
Yeah, so super easy access to everything that you'll need right there. You can see kind of the pairing button below and everything there. Yeah. These are available now. They came out in September. These are $150. $149.99. The Stealth 600 Gen 2's are $99.99.

Larry Hryb:
Wow.

Scott Weber:
So, really amazing price points for both those considering they're Xbox Wireless. I'll tell you ... The premium feel of these is absolutely incredibly, and they're gorgeous too. Yeah.

Larry Hryb:
We started with the A20s, and we worked our way up there. These are just a few of the headsets that are available. There's many, many, many more that work with Xbox One and Xbox Series X and S. Scott, what's the best way for people to kind of find the full portfolio of headphones and accessories for Xbox?

Scott Weber:
We have a lot of them listed on xbox.com. There's an accessory section there where you can go to the audio section and see what's the latest and greatest there. Then, anytime you're at a retailer, you're at Best Buy, just look for that design for Xbox badge ... that little circle that's on the front of these packages here. There you go. You do it. I do it. Anytime you see that, you're going to know, like we talked about, it's that great experience. You can look for keywords like Xbox Wireless. That means that it really is that. No USB dongle. Just pair it direct console, integrated radio, and everything. If it has wireless, it has a USB in the back, but that's a great experience too. They're both wonderful, and we support lots of wired headsets too. We have options for every single person. I use these personally all the time. These are RIGG 500s. This is just a version that is wired and has that swing band tech.

Larry Hryb:
Those you use to plug into the controller directly, right?

Scott Weber:
Exactly. Yeah. You plug them in, and they work great. If you want to use an audio adapter with those, this is the RIG audio adapter that I personally use myself. That adjusts your volume, your chat balance, and all that too. We have lots of options for audio at any price point. I've used Windows Sonic and Dolby headsets too, and they sound great even just plugged in through the 3.5 millimeter jack.

Larry Hryb:
Awesome stuff. Scott, I know I've got to let you go, and I appreciate you coming by. You just talked headsets. You work on a bunch of other stuff. Can I ask you a little bit on some of the other accessories you've worked on, and maybe I'll get you on in a future show.

Scott Weber:
Oh my gosh. It was a busy year. I'll tell you that. This past year, we were really focused on getting our mobile accessories out the door. With xCloud turning into streaming through Game Pass Ultimate and all the titles that we launched back this fall, we had a number of controllers that we worked on to make sure that you could have wonderful experiences on the go with your gaming on your phone or on your tablet, so lots of different form factors ... controllers that pull apart when you put your phone in the middle, ones that connect directly via USB, ones that are mini retro style Bluetooth controllers from partners like PowerA, 8bitdo, and Razer. Some really wonderful stuff there that we were working on.

Scott Weber:
Also, we spent a lot of the past two years working on this C8 storage expansion cart, and ensuring that those that have a need for more storage right at the get-go and having that insane speed that the new consoles have, right? The internal SSD that's on Series X and Series S is crazy. It's beyond anything. You can't just go buy storage that's going to give you that exact same performance, so working directly with C8 to make sure that you could directly replicate the performance and really just seamlessly put it in the back and just leave it there like it's nothing to expand your console's storage at launch and beyond. It was a big effort for us and something we're really proud of.

Larry Hryb:
You guys have done a lot of work, and I need to have you on maybe next year. We'll talk more about accessories. I know you're working on a lot of cool stuff.

Scott Weber:
I love it.

Larry Hryb:
You guys are always working on cool stuff over there, Scott. Scott Weber, thanks so much for telling us about some of the latest head phones that are out. We'll put a link in the description in the show notes off to xbox.com, and talking to us about how DTS, Dolby, and Windows Sonic works great with all these devices. Thank you, my friend. We'll see you later, and have a great holiday.

Scott Weber:
Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Larry Hryb:
All right, so there you go. Now you should know everything about Windows Sonic, Dolby, DTS, and headphones. Jason, there was a lot in there, wasn't it?

Jason Ronald:
Yeah. It's just really exciting to be able to finally talk about some of this. I really recommend for anybody who hasn't seen it ... We have a demo of three spatial audio in gears five available on all the social channels and xbox.com, so highly recommend everybody go out and check it out so that they can actually experience that spatial audio we've been talking about.

Larry Hryb:
Yeah, and I'll put a link in the show notes here, but make sure ... Wear those headphones, because you're really going to want to experience it. Jason, it's great to see you again as always, and it's great to see the work we're doing in audio. This is something that, again, can't be captured in a sheet that says, "Here's how fast a processor is", or how many teraflops it is. It can't be shown in a screenshot. You kind of have to experience it, right?

Jason Ronald:
Exactly. Like you said, it's so much about that experience and about that immersion. We're just really excited for players to see it across a whole wide set of games on our platform, and we're just really excited for the future that is ahead of us with spatial audio.

Larry Hryb:
All right. Looking forward to that. All right. Jason, I said it to you last week. I'll say it you again. Have a great holiday. I know you're taking a little bit of time off, and I know the team's also hard at work getting things done. Thanks again on behalf of all the gamers to you and the team for delivering some great experiences. Any final words before I let you go?

Jason Ronald:
Just want to say thank you to you, Larry, and everybody in the community. I hope everybody has a great holiday, and stay safe out there.

Larry Hryb:
All right. See you guys online, and we look forward to chatting with you in 2021. Thanks Jason.

Jason Ronald:
See ya.