It’s long been a complaint of game audio engineers that their best efforts are overshadowed by the flashy, fullscreen, antialiased work of the artists. Things have slowly improved, however, with publishers now happy to splash out six-figure sums for full orchestral recordings, professional foley effects and Hollywood-name voiceovers.

Most large studios have in-house facilities, complete with recording rooms boasting double-thickness doors and huge mixing desks with banks of flashing lights and sliders. Console technology has also played its part, with both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 supporting realtime Dolby 5.1 surround sound streams so the home-cinema gameplaying crowd knows it’s getting full value from its living room equipment.

Nintendo’s Wii also offers a form of stereo Dolby Surround, even if it is the same Pro Logic II implementation as GameCube’s. The fear of Dolby’s gaming division that it would have no more worlds to conquer after bringing cinematic audio to gaming has proved unfounded, however.

“Online games are huge, and voice is a big part of online games,” says Matt Tullis, Dolby’s senior games manager, explaining the background  to the company’s new online integrated voice solution, entitled Dolby Axon, which is launching for PC in 2009 (in  time, the technology will also be extended to consoles).

“The basic problem is there are lots of disconnects in the system. You have players using mono headsets and low-quality microphones, the codecs aren’t very good, and then there’s the issue of people who have their microphone levels set too high or too low.”

The results, even on relatively controlled services such as Xbox Live, are clipping, distortion and microphones picking up echoes: essentially, an audio mush. “Talking to developers, we heard a lot of complaints about online voice quality,” Tullis says. “We thought this was a perfect opportunity for Dolby to solve an industry problem.”

The first part of the puzzle the company decided to address was somewhat different, however. It was a couple of years ago that Dolby quietly acquired Australian company Spatial Voice Corporation. This start-up out of the University of Wollongong is aiming to improve the 3D spatial accuracy of audio in massively multiplayer online games, and is using a server solution to offload some of the processing overhead from the player’s computer.