How hard would it be for a game console to have 8 channels of audio?

[Bires]

During the video game club at my school (in my classroom), I was listening to 8 ppl playing Halo and the noise was rediculous. Then I started to wonder...why hasn't MS or Sony put stereo outputs on the controllers so individual players could wear headphones and hear their own audio?

How hard would this be, from a technical standpoint? It sure would make 4-player-per-screen gaming a lot more fun.

[shocky123]

Aside from redesigning the audio controller in the systems so that it could output 8 individual ~mono~ channels of audio.... OR.... output 5.1 surround sound for when you're not using headphones? Not tooo hard. Unfortunately you'd only get mono w/ 8 channels.. you'd need 16 if you wanted a L/R perception with your 400 dollar headphones

it's an idea, fun to look at, but improbable as all the games would have to be reprogrammed and audio-fied as well to do all that fun stuff, otherwise you'd have your headphones plugged into your controller.. in which case congrats on the 400 dollar headphones, I bought earplugs for 1.69 at Walmart.... probly work better too. lol

~Kyle

[hapoo]

thats a pretty clever idea. Too bad i just patented it
If you want independant audio, the processing increases with each player, if its shared audio, then its not that big of a deal.

[Bires]

I would want independent, two-channel, positional audio for each player. So players can hear only the sound effects in their general regions, and can stalk other players.

[shocky123]

ooOOO... don't forget that there would need to be a seperate audio channel that somehow f***ed with your neural paths to make it impossible to "look at someone else's screen" grr... cheaters...
( I believe Sony has a patent on this type of technology )

~Kyle