Those of you who have a Creative sound card equipped with a hardware DSP (that includes most of the X-Fi series, excluding the XtremeAudio but not the XtremeMusic, which is a true hardware card; most Audigy cards, except for the LS and SE, are supported as well) may be pleasantly surprised to find out that The Void uses the once popular DirectSound3D API for surround sound. What that means is that even if you're running a modern Windows version (that is, Windows Vista or 7 - I'm not sure if Windows 8 is supported, but it probably is), you can still download the
ALchemy wrapper, turn on CMSS in your sound card settings (as well as MacroFX and ElevationFilter if you have an X-Fi, but those settings aren't available on 5.1+ setups) and enjoy the stunning improvement in audio positioning accuracy.
To demonstrate the difference, I made a couple of videos and uploaded them to YouTube.
DS3D without hardware acceleration:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WiBIGBbQgw
DS3D with hardware acceleration and CMSS:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSr1O8xlKRg
(the videos are meant to be watched with headphones, with all sound processing turned
off in the sound card settings and preferably in HD, because that increases the audio bitrate as well)
In order for the game to make use of ALchemy, the wrapper needs to be placed into the
bin\win32 subfolder of the game installation path.
Those who only have onboard Realtek audio haven't been entirely left out, however. With the 3D SoundBack wrapper, which you can download from the
official Realtek website, you can get surround sound positioning on a multichannel speaker setup. Sadly, you won't get the kind of positioning with headphones that you would if you had a Creative card. The wrapper appears to work very well with The Void, although it may not be compatible with some other games.
Note that older Windows versions, such as Windows XP, have native DirectSound3D support, so wrapper libraries aren't necessary.
Enjoy your gaming experience!