instrument sounds. All these tend to be somewhat muffled by dynamic range compression. To undo this effect, the uses a multiband compander (compressor/expander) with dynamically adjusted compression/expansion. Its main function is to detect transients and to increase their relative volume level. As a consequence of enabling the , the signal is altered, and whether the result improves upon the input audio is purely a matter of perception and can depend on the type of audio being played. CMSS-3D "CMSS-3D recreates realistic surround sound from any audio source and puts you right in the center of the action, whether you are using multichannel speakers or headphones." CMSS-3D is a DSP feature that provides audio enhancement. It requires Creative proprietary drivers and is not supported under Linux OS. Depending on the equipment used, CMSS-3D has 3 variants: CMSS-3D Headphone: When the Creative Control Panel is set to Headphones, this setting creates virtual 3D positional audio via synthesized binaural cues (see Sound localization and Head-related transfer function). If the application generating the audio uses a hardware-accelerated 3D audio API (i.e. DirectSound3D or OpenAL), the input for the binaural synthesis algorithms consists of up to 128 sound sources positioned arbitrarily in 3D space, this is the most accurate utilisation of CMSS-3D. If the application instead generates multi-channel sound directly (e.g. a media player app or a game with software-based audio processing), the input for the binaural synthesis algorithms consist of the 4 to 7 positional sound sources associated with the application's selected speaker configuration. Such applications may use the Speakers settings defined by Windows in which case it is possible to set the Windows Speakers configuration to a multichannel set-up, e.g. 5.1, so that the application will output multi channel audio. CMSS-3D Virtual (Stereo Xpand): When the Creative Control Panel is set to 2/2.1 or 4/4.1 speakers, this setting creates virtual 3D positional audio similar to CMSS-3DHeadphone. The difference is that this includes techniques such as crosstalk cancellation because sound from all speakers reaches BOTH ears which makes the binaural cues more complicated to synthesize. Additionally, the listener must be located in the "sweet spot" between all of the speakers for the effect to work properly. Note that this is not available (including MacroFX and ElevationFilter) when using 5.1 or more speakers. In these cases, 3D audio sources are mapped to speakers by manipulating the relative volume levels for the different speaker positions. Hardware