What can or should you do when someone is factually wrong? This already sounds really bad but lesgooooo

Okay I was watching an audio guy on sloptube talk about THE WII’S AUDIO IS A BIT MORE COMPLICATED (it isn’t, it’s very similar to the Gamecube, PSP or probably PS2) which was cool, except he sorta handwaved Dolby Pro Logic II as “a surround processor that looks at the content of your sound and makes it surround”.

This is sort of true, kinda, but it’s not remotely specific enough: you use phasing, panning and other weird shit to make a stereo master that will both sound okay on two speakers, and have the Pro Logic II tech in your AV receiver use an algorithm of sorts that reads those phase changes and panning as denoting specific channels. If something is panned equally between the left and right stereo channels, Pro Logic II routes that sound to the center speaker. If a sound in the left or right channel is phased +90° or -90°, Pro Logic II will send them to the rear left or rear right speaker. It also grabs the bottom ~100Hz of the whole signal to route to the subwoofer. Its predecessor, the 1982 Dolby Surround (later upgraded to Pro Logic in 1987) was sort of lame in only having one rear channel, but Pro Logic II can actually produce very impressive five-channel results, my favourite example being Metal Gear Solid 3 on PS2.

Pro Logic II is slightly obscure because it never really got a chance to shine; Dolby Surround/Pro Logic was a staple of common mass-market VHS format videotapes and even Laserdiscs from the early 1980s to mid 1990s, but Pro Logic II came around in 2000, well after both Laserdisc and DVD had introduced Dolby Digital and DTS to the mass market in the 90s, which are digital formats that carry six (left, right, center, L surround, R surround are 5, sub is .1 so 6 channels lol) channels of discrete audio, no matrixing or phasing or panning of stereo required. It is a great system, the old Pro Logic had its rear channel limited to 7KHz max frequency response, but all channels of Pro Logic II are capable of full-frequency response.

In film terms Pro Logic II was never really used, outside of a few junky low-budget DVDs where they didn’t want to re-encode the film’s multichannel mix for Dolby Digital, and so just reissued the old Pro Logic track, stuff like the Maple DVD of The Running Man, or the 1997 Director’s Cut of Blade Runner. The point of Pro Logic II was apparently more to offer better upmixing of stereo films/music/games to 5.1 channels, which it does acceptably, like Low by David Bowie sounds kinda cool in Pro Logic II.

Where Pro Logic II really found its use was in games, though - while the Xbox could encode Dolby Digital on the fly and many of its games have discrete multichannel surround, the Gamecube and Playstation 2 were basically incapable of proper multichannel in games. (Save a few weird four-channel implementations of DTS seen in GTA Vice City or SSX3) The vast majority of high budget games on PS2 and Gamecube used Pro Logic II, like Okami and Shadow of the Collossus, or Super Mario Sunshine, F-Zero GX and Star Wars Rogue Leader. Plus, if a game was primarily targeting Xbox or PC, like Ubisoft’s Splinter Cell or Prince of Persia games, they’d almost always have a Dolby Digital 5.1 mix on those platforms, but Gamecube and PS2 nerds could still get that experience with Pro Logic II. It worked pretty well, the X-Wing demo from Rogue Leader where the fighter flies in a circle around the room is very cool, and again the ambient wildlife sounds and directional footsteps in Metal Gear Solid 3 are great. Encoding a stereo track with Pro Logic II was also very space efficient compared to the gigabyte or two you’d have to set aside for Dolby Digital, since Pro Logic II is just two channels. Great for the Gamecube’s tiny DVDs!

So when the Wii came about, it was very similar architecturally to the Gamecube, all ATi graphics and PowerPC 750 based CPUs, allowing devs to happily reuse their PS2 and Gamecube era SDKs and engines, like you saw Ubisoft do with the Jade Engine. Since the Wii was a Real Prole Console and discrete multichannel audio is bourgeois decadence, the vast majority of high-budget Wii releases used Pro Logic II, or later IIx for 7.1 channels, or even IIz with height channels up high. Just off the top of my head, all of the Wii releases of Call of Duty used it, Prince of Persia Forgotten Sands used it, Super Mario Galaxy 1 & 2 used it, The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess uses it, Sonic Colours & Unleashed use it. This is deeply interesting to me personally, because this matrixed stereo-to-multichannel audio shit goes back through the 1970s, to the Sansui QS four-channel matrix Dolby Surround was initially based on, and alllllll the way back to the 1960s, when Wendy Carlos was hanging out in a university auditorium and wired a bunch of big speakers together before making Switched-On Bach in four channels. This is the final resting place of matrixed audio basically, films and music had long since forgotten Pro Logic and its runt siblings in favour of proper discrete stuff, but Pro Logic II in games is pretty good honestly.

Now, while I realise that this is all basically shit nobody cares about, the audio guy in the video talks in extreme depth about ADPCM and other compression formats the Wii has, among other things, so the lack of detail on this is weird. He has some weird wiki page where he says that only like ten wii games use Pro Logic II, which as you can see is a deeply grievous factual error. It’s a huge portion of the Wii’s audio output to just brush aside, especially considering that audio guy again has a pretty deep understanding of the audio formats the Wii uses to play stereo music, up to and including MIDI-style sequencing. Sort of a shame.

I’m kind enough not to demand his execution for this, but I also felt the strong urge to post basically this rant under his video. I did not however, because I can sort-of sense that people fucking hate when you crawl out of the woodwork to spew information upon them, they see the correction as an attack on their bloodline or smth. Personally, when I post about say, Tactics Ogre, I’m always desperately hoping that some nerd DOES rise from the gutters to shower me with knowledge about the game, so that I may expand my understanding of it, but my brain is deeply funny/unfunny depending on your perspective.

So, is this shit I should just not ever say at all? Is there a specific set of wording rules I can follow so as not to cause problems with it? Should I just give zero fucks and school funnyboys about stuff like this anyway???