Did You Know These Retro Game Consoles are Capable of Surround Sound?

Surround sound? On my 90s consoles?? It’s more likely than you think.

So much excellent work has been done in recent years to cover and catalog relevant information for getting the best possible (or most convenient and effective) video quality out of retro consoles. There’s a fantastic community dedicated to documenting everything you’d need to know to get a beautiful RGB picture on a consumer or professional-grade CRT, or razor sharp integer-scaled pixels on a modern flat-panel display with minimal lag. But there hasn’t been quite as much work done on audio for these systems. Which makes sense! In most cases, the audio for retro games consoles is more or less, well, what it is. It’s not a thing which needs to be “upscaled”, per se. Generally speaking, if you have well-shielded cables, you’re good to go. There are some outliers; for example, picking the right model Genesis/Mega Drive, or getting optical audio from your original Xbox for 5.1 Dolby Digital. And there are people doing important work on this front, like expanding the audio capabilities of the SNES/SFC to include CD quality audio, or analyzing all the different Genesis/Mega Drive hardware revisions’ audio signatures.

But there’s something else in the audio department that many of these old consoles are capable of, something that I hear very little discussion about: Surround sound.

Did you know that your SNES is capable of surround sound, and that a bunch of games actually use it?

Fatal Fury Special on the Super Famicom, rocking a Dolby Surround badge on the label. The drums are behind you! Highly recommended.

A whole bunch of older game consoles used Dolby Surround (four-channel system decoded by ProLogic), and I suppose in theory anything with stereo audio outputs could make use of it. Let’s talk briefly about the SNES/Super Famicom first. The problem is, Dolby licensing was (and is) very expensive, so while we got several games that proudly brandished the Dolby Surround logo on their cart labels or start screens (Samurai Shodown, Fatal Fury Special, Jurassic Park 1 & 2, Super Turrican 1 & 2, Donkey Kong Country, etc.), there are plenty of others that just offered a “Surround” option in the audio settings that didn’t necessarily license the Dolby certification, but made use of similar techniques (Super Castlevania IV, Seiken Densetsu III, Star Fox, Yoshi’s Island, Star Ocean, among others).

You’ll see similar surround sound employment on the N64 (boot up Ocarina of Time and stand in front of the entrance to Zora’s Domain with the waterfall crashing behind you and try not to feel cozy! Both Zelda games on the N64 are officially licensed by Dolby, as are Perfect Dark and a few more!) and on the PlayStation (Chrono Cross has a big ol’ Dolby Surround badge on the back of the case, as do Final Fantasy VIII, and many other games!). And there even appears to be documented cases of 3DO games making use of the same technology. And maybe a small number of TurboGrafx/PC Engine CD games. So much confirmation work has yet to be done on the subject.

What about QSound?

QSound is an interesting technology that uses specific algorithms to widen the stereo imaging and provide the illusion of something resembling “3D Sound”. No one is going to mistake it for actual surround sound, but with some good speakers the separation is very impressive. This was famously used in a lot of Capcom arcade cabinets in the early 90s, several PlayStation games, lots of Sega games, and a couple Sting and Pink Floyd albums, among others. In later years, the QSound algorithm was advanced for use in handheld gaming and to create 3D sound imaging in headphones.

To my knowledge, QSound is the only 3D audio option employed on the Sega Mega CD, Saturn, and Dreamcast, though I’m going to need to confirm that with sources in the future, because it may be inaccurate. As of the time of writing, I am unaware of any official multi-channel surround sound options available on Sega platforms, unfortunately, with the exception of the NHL 2K games on Dreamcast. That said, this Sega-16 user appears to have set out to try to document as many Dreamcast games as possible that seem to be employing some kind of surround sound usage, though it’s always possible that their receiver is interpolating a faux-surround using multiple channels for added effect, as that is the default feature for two-channel audio signals on most modern receivers.

So how does it work?

Basically, it works the same way analog Dolby Surround did on VHS, which in turn is pretty similar to how Quadrophonic Sound worked on vinyl records during that unfortunately short-lived trend. Left and Right channels are recorded normally, then the alternate channels’ information is carried in an inverted-phase signal that piggybacks on the Left and Right channels, usually via stereo RCA cables. On a normal stereo setup, these signals play normally as part of the standard two-channel audio format. But with the proper multi-channel receiver (or separate decoder unit), these inverted-phase signals are detected and re-routed to their respective speakers (center, rear, etc.). This is called a matrix surround, and it’s a brilliantly elegant solution.

Legendary composer Chris Huelsbeck provides some valuable input!

Pioneer VSP-333, a Dolby Surround decoder unit to let people with two-channel receivers make use of early Dolby Surround with two rear channel speakers.

That said, don’t confuse this with the AC-3 RF-Modulated surround sound info that LaserDisc used, that’s a whole other topic for another day, that I’d love to get into.

So how can I utilize it?

The good news here is that it’s pretty straight-forward in comparison to the beautiful rabbit-hole that is analog video. You may already have the necessary equipment! Long story short, if you have a modern AVR and surround setup already, you’re almost definitely good to go. But if you want to go vintage…

Here’s what you need:

• Console and games that support multi-channel surround sound.
• A multi-channel home theater receiver, preferably one that can decode Dolby Pro-Logic II, as it is backwards-compatible with Pro-Logic I, which works for the old-fashioned Dolby Surround as well. Any modern receiver should be able to do this no problem. We use a Denon AVR-S930H for our main setup, and it decodes old analog surround beautifully. We also use a Sony STR-DA1ES for our retro setup, which was specifically built for this exact purpose, and also works beautifully.
• Speakers! Different analog surround formats use different speaker arrangements (three-channel, four-channel, five-channel, 5.1, etc.) so my recommendation is to at least use a 5.1 (five speakers and a subwoofer) setup and let the receiver assign channels accordingly. This will also let you scale up and make use of more modern surround solutions as well, depending on your receiver.

If you plan on using modern hardware for games and movies on this setup as well, I recommend just going full-on 7.1 or 7.2 and buying an Atmos-capable receiver. It’s well worth it, it will handle your retro hardware perfectly too, and you’ll be future-proofed for a while. And before you ask, yes, you can totally fit a 7.1 setup in your tiny apartment without it being an eyesore! We’ve been doing it for years and can’t recommend it enough. Okay that’s enough editorializing.

Now thankfully, after the analog era this gets much simpler. At some point game consoles started using TOSLINK (optical audio) to deliver 5.1 digital surround (or four-channel Pro-Logic II in the case of the PS2), then eventually HDMI, which will have you covered up through at least Dolby Atmos.

Speaking of HDMI, here’s a weird thing about matrix surround signals: They seem to still work exactly as intended over HDMI. I’ve tried multiple SNES games that support Dolby Surround on our Analogue Super NT via HDMI, and our Denon receiver (AVR-S930H from 2017) correctly recognized it as matrixed Dolby Surround, switched to Pro-Logic II mode, and distributed channels accordingly. I have yet to test this, but I expect it will be the same if you play a PS1 game on a PS3 over either HDMI or TOSLINK. Further research is needed here, obviously.

Very blurry old cell phone photo of Fatal Fury Special on an Analogue Super NT, correctly outputting multi-channel Dolby Surround on a modern receiver, via HDMI.

Quick Guide:

This will need refinement as time goes on, but here are your best options off the top of my head. Not every game will support these features, but lots do!

• Super Nintendo/Super Famicom: Dolby Surround compatible
• Analogue Super NT: Dolby Surround compatible over HDMI (presumably with the Analogue DAC as well, but currently unconfirmed)
• Sega CD/Mega CD: QSound
• TurboGrafx CD/PC Engine CD: Multi-channel surround, unconfirmed
• Sega Saturn: QSound
• Sony PlayStation: Dolby Surround and QSound compatible
• Nintendo 64: Dolby Surround compatible
• Sega Dreamcast: QSound confirmed, Dolby Surround in limited confirmed uses, and several unconfirmed uses
• Sony PlayStation 2: Dolby Surround and QSound compatible, as well as Dolby Pro-Logic II via TOSLINK
• Microsoft Xbox: Dolby Digital 5.1 compatible via TOSLINK (separate add-on)
• Nintendo Gamecube: Dolby ProLogic II compatible via analog cables or aftermarket digital HDMI solutions
• Microsoft Xbox 360: Dolby Digital 5.1 via TOSLINK or HDMI, depending on your model
• Nintendo Wii: Dolby ProLogic II compatible via analog cables or aftermarket digital HDMI solutions
• Sony PlayStation 3: Unbelievable amount of audio formats supported, basically everything you could think of, all the way up through 7.1. I still watch all 1080p Blu-Rays on a PS3 because of this reason. It can even output audio from HDMI, TOSLINK, and analog stereo all at once. It’s an absolute powerhouse of audio.
• Nintendo Wii U: Linear PCM 5.1 Surround via HDMI
• Sony PlayStation 4: Linear PCM, Bitstream, Dolby 7.1
• Microsoft Xbox One (all): Dolby Atmos via HDMI
• Nintendo Switch: Linear PCM 5.1 Surround via HDMI

Note: I’m writing this article largely from memory to get a head start on trying to collect some of this info, to be refined further over time. Information on this subject has been somewhat difficult to come by and collate, so this is going to have to be something of a living document that I’ll update as new information comes to light. In the future, I’d love a wiki-style community-built page that tells you the audio options of all your old consoles, and highlights games that made specific use of different technologies. And other specifics, like, will Chrono Cross’ Dolby Surround for sure work over HDMI via PS3 emulation, or a docked PSP Go? etc.