In 8D audio, how is the audio able to sound like it’s behind or in front of you even though there are only left or right outputs?
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The term 8D is a marketing gimmick. It only uses left and right inputs because it is actually just stereo sound, and stereo only uses left and right.
Now, having said that, they can use digital sound mixing technology to manipulate the sound in ways that simply sticking two microphones in front of a band can’t. In a modern recording studio, every instrument and every singer is recorded separately. So, by adjusting the volume of each singer/instrument in the left and right channel, they can “position” each singer/instrument anywhere along the left/right dimension.
Now, here’s where the illusion starts. Imagine there is a singer in front of, and a bit to the left of you. Now, when she sings, you will hear her voice in your left ear a little bit before you hear it in your right ear. So far, this is what normal stereo does. Now, imagine that there is a wall to your left. What will you hear? You will hear the singer in your left ear, then the right, then you will hear the echo of the singer as the sound bounces off of the wall, first in your left ear, then your right.
Now imagine a violin player is standing beside the singer (to your right). The sound from the violin is going to hit your right ear first, then the left. In this case though, the sound bouncing off the wall is going to hit your left ear first, and then the right.
A computer can easily calculate all of those timings, working out the math of sound in order to place musicians anywhere. A computer can coordinate the sounds from multiple musicians (and computing the echos off multiple virtual walls) to make it seem like the band is circling around you. It’s basically the same ray tracing math that graphics cards do to compute an image and its reflections, except it’s done with sound instead of light.
However fancy it may be, it’s still just stereo, so all it needs is left and right.
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