Yeah, I can confirm this. Sound is very flat in this game. I noticed it when I switched from UT2k4 to QL. You can only tell if your opponent is coming from front, back, right or left by sound. But if he is above or beneath you only experience will tell you.
don't know about Q3, but in CS a3d was considered a cheat because it tripled the range you could hear sounds. so maybe that was the reason for it's removal in Q3.
Exactly!
I remember I had some expensive SB compatible sound card made by Turtle Beach, and there was a special driver available from A3D which translated the A3D stuffz to Dsound3D calls. After trying out A3D support in Q3, I concluded that it's not worth it because it made things 20% slower for nothing but some crapy echo effects.
After some time I received my Diamond MX300 with a Vortex2 chip onboard, and the difference was astonishing. Perhaps the reverb was a little too much for my taste, but the positional effect was something I never heard before in a game, and it was way ahead of anything else for sure.
R.I.P Aureal:(
edit: it was patch 1.27g which removed the Aureal A3D support