Pure mono/pure stereo/non-HRTF audio listeners

[BlueCyro]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

When using listeners with the intention of piping them to an audio output (be that an intercom system or a walkie talkie), the output can often times be spatialized - e.g. come from a single point, and therefore it's output becomes monophonic; as if you've played the signal through a single speaker at that point.

Since all listeners are implicitly stereo and have the Steam audio spatialization applied to them, the directionality of the listener and attenuation of the left & right channels affects the way the resultant audio sounds, even if the output is mixed down to mono (such as when connected to an audio output that is spatialized).

For the purposes of creating something like an omnidirectional, single-channel microphone w/ speaker, this is a problem because the attenuation and frequency response is that of a pair of human ears with a human head in the middle of them.

Describe the solution you'd like

I would like it if there was either an enum on the listener, or an alternative listener component which could provide the ability to hear sounds in the user's choice of the following methods:

• A single-channel, monophonic listener that has no HRTF applied and only attenuates the audio volume by distance
• A stereo listener that has no HRTF applied and only attenuates volume via dot-product stereo panning (or similar) & distance

Describe alternatives you've considered

Use listeners as they exist now

• With spatialized (mono) audio outputs:
  • The audio will sound different in the output depending on which way the listener is facing
  • Audio will also sound different depending on which way it originates from relative to the listener (e.g. more muffled from behind, more crisp in front)
• With volume meters
  • The volume meter will also be affected by the HRTF, throwing off any thresholding or math you may wish to do with it
  • Channel volume meters will also similarly be affected by the HRTF, and the difference between the left and right channels is not intuitive to use mathematically as a result

Additional Context

Personally, I think these features would be beneficial as you typically want to use more analytical & predictable solutions that can reliably capture the input sound when constructing A -> B sound transport creations. In other words; I would like to use a closer analog to a proper microphone when making a microphone rather than being relegated to using a pair of human ears. :P

Requesters

Myself