from warren dale's report on:

AudioTrack - GDC Trip Report Summary
GAME DEVELOPERS CONFERENCE
March 17-19, 1999

Beyond Stereo - 4 and 5.1 Channel Playback
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Users/developers continue to voice their dissatisfaction with stereo playback
of spatial sound - most unaccellerated solutions with limited or no filtering
are little more than planar panning. Except for Aureal and Diamond (an Aureal
technology parner), all the spatial audio venders at the show (Creative Labs,
Sensura, Qsound Labs, Dolby) chose to show off their newest hardware/software
with either quad or surround speaker playback systems. Most used 4 speaker
output taking advantage of DirectSound's M-to-N channel functionality.
However, Dolby was showing off the "Miles" product from RAD that output encoded
5.1 format. As more home "entertainment" systems support multichannel playback
the 5.1 audio output option could grow to become the high-end target audio
delivery system for console (Nintendo, Saga, ...) and computer game play.

Sun MUST develop a road map for multi-channel audio output support in Java
(thru JavaSound) and in general on Solaris workstation if we want any of the
entertainment development market.