Homer_SS
Now i have the Ps2 hooked up to my surround sound system via Optical output with Gt3, Gt4P and i still get only prologic II, the effect of surround is there but its not really....meaning i hear from all the sides but the sound is limited to left and right, no front, back or center.
Remember, the game has to support PLII in order for it to work properly. GT3 doesn't use it, it exports
only a normal 2-channel stereo signal. I'm guessing that GT4P does the same thing. With stereo signals, when you force PLII, all it does is split the sound up, 50/50 front/back. In this case, it's generally better to just run the game in stereo, since that's how it's encoded.
With PLII, it's a whole different story. The game actually generates five channels of audio, and then downsamples them into the 2-channel output. But it does so in a very specific way.. the rear and center channels are "spread out" into the left/right channels, but in a way that's unique to PLII. So, when you plug those two channels into a reciever and tell it to decode PLII, it "extracts" the rear/center channels out of the stereo signal and sends them to where they need to be, according to a very specific system inherent in PLII encoding. Because of the way it needs to be encoded, only PLII signals will really benefit from it.
Try it with a game that fully supports PLII (it'll say so on the box, and usually on the disc as well, it'll have the Dolby Surround logo, with "Pro Logic II" written underneath it). And make sure that PLII is turned on in the audio options (I've found it's usually set to Stereo by default in the games I've tried it on).
Then tell your reciever to decode PLII. I recommend
Medal of Honor: Frontline, that one has excellent PLII encoding. In a quick test I did, I heard a character walk all the way around me while talking. Even when he was offscreen, I could tell exactly where he was, the voice did a full 360 around me.. Center>Left>Rear Left>Rear Right>Right>Center. It was quite impressive. Then a short firefight later, bullets whizzing by in all directions. Very immersive. I'm looking forward to trying out the D-Day level.