Nyaah. The ALchemy thing didn't really improve things very much. Sure you get multi-channel audio from the games that were originally coded for the DirectSound 3D and the EAX extensions, but all you get is the multi-channel positional audio and
not the brilliant reverb and environment-specific effects that the CA 20K1 and EAX 5.0 HD were originally made for....what a waste!
ALchemy is basically a compatibility layer between the application's DirectSound commands and the operating-system's OpenAL api. Windows Vista lacks DirectSound. So all those pre-Vista games that had those amazing multi-channel audio effects that relied on DirectSound, now send their commands to the OS HAL, and ALchemy forms a pre-layer to the HAL and captures these commands, translates them into OpenAL commands and sends it to the ICD (Installable client driver). Stacks from here now go to the OS kernel and finally to the hardware. ALchemy can't translate EAX 5 commands and hence, it's goodbye EAX for us. So this completely defeats the purpose of having a 10000+ MIPS audio processor.
