TR Forums

Fact: I really enjoy high quality audio, for both music and gaming. I am willing to pay somewhat of a premium for the experience.

Fact: I am an absolute moron when it comes to understanding computer audio.

Issue: I am interested in a great surround sound headphone experience when playing games, particularly first-person-shooters, where it can be very important and fun to hear discrete sounds. I am trying to determine whether it would be best to use my existing equipment, or whether I should purchase a dedicated "7.1 gaming headset." Any advice would be appreciated. For reference, I am currently using a pair of M-Audio AV40s for general usage, but would like to switch to headphones for gaming.

Current Equipment
Creative Soundblaster Z or AudioEngine D-1 DAC (I own both)
$200 Sennheiser 3.5mm over-ear headphones (bass heavy, beautiful colorful sound) or a pair of reference $180 Grados.

Based on my limited understanding, I could use my existing Sennheiser headphones, enable virtual surround sound in my Creative Soundblaster control panel, and enjoy really good audio, including great positional audio. The Creative virtual surround sound would do a really good job replicating 7 actual speakers in games. Is that correct? This would negate any need for a ridiculous looking pair of "7.1 gaming headset," which is probably just an average pair of headphones with an integrated USB soundcard. However, it is unclear to me whether a "7.1 gaming headset" offers surround sound capabilities beyond that of my current equipment.

If I am wrong, what gaming headsets should I consider? I was thinking the Kingston HyperX Cloud II or the $100 models from the likes of Corsair or Logitech.

Thanks.

Not really my area, but the hardware difference between virtual surround and true surround sound headphones is that the former is software processing only, fading as appropriate then delivering to 2 channels, and the latter uses hardware to mimic surround sound speakers, multiple discrete speakers (?) in each headphone which deliver different channels of sound. An example is the ASUS Strix 7.1

Of course, most of us have only 2 ears, so in principle software should be able to mostly do this, but ...

Have you tried running with your current gear and virtual surround sound?

Oh we could start ranting about those "7.1" headsets...instead, just know that it's a gimmick, and headphones should only ever have 1 driver per ear. So the headphones you currently have should be very good.

As for positional audio, yeah, you will have to simulate that using the tools available to you. The easiest way to do this is to enable the headphone modes on games. Creative's virtual sound stuff might do a better job, but I am unfamiliar with it.

Headphones with multiple drivers in a cup are complete garbage and should be avoided at all costs.

OP, keep your current setup. Its perfectly fine. I wouldn't use any virtual surround sound option unless it was specifically built into the game you're playing (and even then...). Any third-party solution like in your Soundblaster drivers is going to screw with the source audio, not enhance it. Also, those "gaming" headsets... they have cheap DACs into cheap headphones. You have superior equipment already.

If you really feel compelled to upgrade then simply look for a better headphone. Maybe a Sennheiser HD 650. Frankly I think you're probably fine with what you have now.

Topinio wrote:

Have you tried running with your current gear and virtual surround sound?

No, I probably should do that, huh? Would have made sense to test out first before asking questions. My bad. I have been traveling for work and have not been home, but will test out this weekend.

I understand that headphones with 7 tiny speakers in each ear generally suck, but I just was not sure if 7.1 gaming headsets with virtual surround sound had some other type of magic that I was not aware of.

Thanks.

Thanks for the feedback, Topinio, superjawes, and slowriot. I appreciate it! Sounds like I was not too far off. I will test virtual surround sound vs. OFF (using only in-game options).

Once I get around to buying a mansion, I will buy a fancy receiver and 7 actual reference studio monitors, on stands, with a nice big subwoofer.

You could also have a look at Sound Blaster X-Fi MB3. The point of the software is having a Sound Blaster card in software ran on the CPU for onboard audio but it does allow you to have surround sound through 2 channel headphones up to Dolby Digital 7.1. It did a fantastic job of surround sound for me. It might be worth checking into?

Have a look, and listen to this video if interested.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSBMrHfsXjE

Here's the Creative Store page for the software.
http://software.store.creative.com/p/so ... r-x-fi-mb3

Try out Razer Surround. Software virtual surround sound not tied to hardware. Does a way better job than Dolby Headphone on Xonar cards. I haven't tried Creative's, but see many who prefer Razer over that too. You can tune it (somewhat) to you ears as well. It makes itself look like a 7.1 channel audio device to Windows/games - so make sure you match your in-game settings to that eg. 5.1/7.1

Everyone's ears and heads are different when it comes to positional audio, so definitely check out as many options as you can, including in game options (which are starting to get better again), but I would have to disagree with slowriot re not using third-party options. As far as I can tell, most games' headphone setting is often just an EQ adjustment, perhaps modified dynamic range, and sometimes a basic HRTF slapped on. I would argue only a few games have a really good implementation that would be better than something like Razer. Yes some software/hardware significantly degrades the quality of sound while doing this processing, but not all. Razer for example doesn't alter the quality of sound in a significant way for gaming. Sure, you can slaughter the sound with bass boost and the EQ if you want... Like they do with their horrible 'demo' on the website..

If you can get a good virtualised surround solution (in-game or 3rd party) to work for your ears, it is far superior for positional audio than straight simple stereo. It's by no means perfect, but it's the best we have for headphone gaming at the moment. A physical surround setup with speakers is great if you have the space and $, but it still has it's issues (eg. hearing sound bounce around your physical environment). Then again, feeling bass rather than just hearing is hard to beat... if you can get away with gaming at volume Can't imagine it would be very good when you need to communicate in multiplayer either..

Ideally we would be getting well simulated audio from the game engine (? an open API that can be plugged into the engine - don't laugh, I have no idea about programming!) that is modeled to a channel for each ear; "binaural", if you will. AMD and NVIDIA both have been talking about better audio simulation, but I haven't seen anything actually implemented yet. Gaming audio doesn't seem to get much love for some reason, but hopefully VR will force some real progress (and subtle head movements are a part of how we work out where sound is coming from anyway).

TL;DR
Compare each game's in-game headphone setting to something like Razer Surround and see what works best for you. For now at least, most of the time I think you'll find 3rd party better, sadly.

and yes, stay away from surround headsets - virtual or multi driver

Are we gonna have to wait for Aureal's patents to expire before we see widespread consumer use of HRTF?

npore, I will check out Razer Surround when I test my headphones and software this weekend. Or whenever my work demands stop. So, like retirement? And thanks for the info!

As far as I understand Creative bought out and killed A3D. And that's it. There are other companies that are developing and have developed similar solutions for simulating 3D audio for 2 channels (rather than virtualising surround sound (ie. more than 2 channel), which also uses HRTF). But most developers don't bother for some reason. For it to work well like A3D did, it does require some level of implementation with the game engine. Guess graphics get the focus; more marketable.

Just had a quick look around, found this: http://www.twobigears.com They make it sound like its quite easy to get at least a basic implementation in. Anyway, I hope we will see some good progress with VR driving things.

what do you call a guy with a shovel on his head?

Doug! Get it? Doug!

(double post and I don't see delete button anywhere. sorry)

thing about audio is you can go in deep. reeeeeeeeal deep. as a PC guy, it's good to look at audio, and good that you have that option. it really is a nice component of making an enjoyable gaming PC that does a nice job overall. these days it gets overlooked. now, truth is, motherboard audio is getting really good and gets better all the time. I still don't think it's a match for the Xonars yet though in terms of sound quality. but it came to light a while back that there is some significant difference building in terms of software doodads and game-focused flexibility which may or may not matter to you.

in general, though, audio can break down like this.

most important: get nice speakers. aka headphones. aka head on over to some audiophile site, ask around, see what's good, ignore the elitism (you're coming from PC it should be old hat), don't spend too much. (china has lots of neodymium coming out of its ears. so you don't need to drop $400 to put some in yours. even less than that)

next important: get headphone driver. good headphones will need to be driven with an amplification stage that outputs decent power while maintaining clean signal. this is not most motherboards. they're getting better at the output power part, but not necessarily the clean signal part. frankly I don't think they're much good at either outside of the highest-end $250-$300 branded-silly halo stuff. so get an amp. usually this will come in the form of a device you plug into the wall that sits on your computer. it will take in a stereo mini or 1/4inch and output some combination of the same way. you can also get a DAC/AMP combo, often powered and connected by usb. a lot of audiophiles would say this is the highest-quality PC solution because it's separate and not subjected to the EM noise inside the case, and will have its analogue stages isolated electrically from its USB and therefore will not give you noise when you plug it in to a port. though in recent times motherboard vendors are starting to put fancy shielded USB ports on their boards. no idea of the effectiveness of that or that if it being necessary means you got a crappy DAC. <<(ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION TR BECAUSE I THINK SOME OF YOU SKIP THIS STEP AND DON'T REALIZE JUST HOW IMPORTANT IT IS IF YOU HAVE NICE HEADPHONES. YOU CAN'T JUST SHOVE THEM INTO A XONAR. unless it's a DG. then shove away my good man)

next important: DAC. get a nice DAC. folks would say make sure you get an external one. as for PC components, ASUS makes fancy ones, and then there is the good ol' Xonar DX/DS/DG. I myself have a Xonar DX. sounds lovely. drivers (at least for the pre-Essence stuff) are old and unmaintained. I use the unofficial third party ones, the UNi drivers. so there's that to consider. the external DAC as I've said reduces noise, but EM interference should not be a major problem for the sound card, which is designed to function well in that environment and is already fairly isolated from the rest of the computer, all assuming you're plugging straight into it. the Xonar line besides the DG (ignoring the newer Essence stuff because I don't know much about it other than it's headphone focused and really, it does seem nice) were designed with home theatre in mind, however, and maybe the threshold for acceptable EM noise in a high-quality audio scenario is different when operating with home-theater as your target and theoretically could be a problem if you have super-sensitive headphones or something (likely your headphones are of a sufficient impedance that it shouldn't matter. and I plug into the FP and don't hear stuff most times). also with that home-theatre focus is the reality that those cards make only mild engineering considerations to amplification. also, as a headphone user, you will be wanting to plug into the front of your PC more likely. this means sending your audio data over the motherboard to the FP header and that depends on the motherboard to get the signal there cleanly. then it goes over a little wire but that could be shielded yourself if the shielding on it really sucks. there's usually not a ton of stuff over that way in the case. I myself have my Xonar going to the FP and the odd time if the system goes nuts for whatever reason, I get a bit of audible noise. it's infrequent enough and brief enough that I don't care. I could just as easily plug the cord into the card direct. but by god I spent time wiring those damn little FP wires and navigating all those wires in there that I'm gonna use the FP. come at me audio bros! come at me!

so yeah. in general, breaks down like that. speakers > AMP > DAC

fhohj wrote:

so yeah. in general, breaks down like that. speakers > AMP > DAC

Whereas I would reverse that priority order. If the source sound quality is no good, all a really good set of speakers is going to do is tell you how bad the source is every time you listen to it.

[/PM sent to fix double post]

Captain Ned wrote:

fhohj wrote:

so yeah. in general, breaks down like that. speakers > AMP > DAC

Whereas I would reverse that priority order. If the source sound quality is no good, all a really good set of speakers is going to do is tell you how bad the source is every time you listen to it.

[/PM sent to fix double post]

People are largely not using sources THAT BAD these days. Ok, sure, some are out there. But the OP of this thread is definitely not one of those people. His Soundblaster is going to scale just fine with higher quality speakers or headphones. And likewise a modern Realtek onboard solution will also scale decently assuming there isn't interference issues (very well could be, but those will be obvious artifacts and not a lack of fidelity). If a person is using a decent pair of headphones they'll likely notice much better improvements with a new amp than a new DAC, assuming they are already at "5 years or newer Realtek" levels of source.

I also don't think audio is that hard. You can just go out and buy a Schiit Modi 2 DAC, Schiit Magni 2 amp, and a Sennheiser HD 650 all for under $500 used and never worry about it again.

ok so I'm guilty of not well reading the original post. sorry op.

one thing I wanted to say is that any time you enable some kind of post-processing like virtualization you are reducing sound quality. virtualization is essentially bastardizing the original signal for some other goal. reducing listener fatigue or appealing to listener psychology through waveform manipulation based on observed listener responses to make music sound "better" even though it sounds worse. just specifically relating to what you mean by quality, I would think you're gonna be all in the aforementioned listener psychology camp because you're not gonna get any better quality of the sound signal by enabling a bunch of manipulation.

but there's two things I wanted to say which is why I'm posting again. first is that I wouldn't really trust the sound quality of any "non-audio" headset vs. a comparable "audio" one. the "gaming" set might do some fancy trick crafted by an audio engineer working specifically for that company, but it probably cuts corners on waveform recreation or component quality as a result.

second is that I'm not sure that stuff can be really trustworthy. I honestly don't know what we're talking about here. are we talking about getting software to output 7.1 to card to a set that takes in a 7.1 and then virtualizes it? who says the maker of this set is any better at such things than Dolby? you got no guarantees there. besides that, could you really trust a 7.1 virtualization to create a faithful picture of the real 7.1 signal? I'm not so sure. if you had some API employed by the game, and the card (the DSP on the set too if one is present), that supplied positional and decibel information so the logic involved could make good decisions about how to manipulate the waveform, then maybe you could do that well. otherwise, I'm just not sure how it works. I'm guessing they'd be doing some kind of waveform analysis and making guesses based on statistics and then remixing from there. that seems really easy to fool though. but then I have no clue whether they can actually tell whether something blowed up behind you or in front of you because game engines all do a dummy doppler the same way for instance and the audio engineers in quest picked up on that and are exploiting it.

but yeah in general, without a situation where you have the game software, and the logic wherever it is, all thinking about the same thing, I would think it's a crapshoot.

so I'm guessing start here? http://www.blueripplesound.com/compatible-games

nothing bothers with EAX anymore. so you'd probably need to look for a game and a card that has OpenAL support.

edit: wow nevermind about that. that seems dead. seems this is getting really looked at now thanks to VR. probably there will be an extension to a present-day video API or a new API that folds in sophisticated 3d sound support. I looked around but I got nothing any more useful than the suggestion to look into that free Razer 7.1 thing so I'm gonna stop posting now.

So as a follow-up question: Let's say I decide to go with a standard, but quality, set of normal (non-gaming) headphones. Let's also say I stay away from virtual surround sound and instead stick standard audio, as intended by a game engine. Should I use my Creative Soundblaster Z or my Audioengine D1 DAC? From a gaming, quality, or performance standpoint, does the Creative card offer anything of value or my D1 DAC?

Spyder22446688 wrote:

So as a follow-up question: Let's say I decide to go with a standard, but quality, set of normal (non-gaming) headphones. Let's also say I stay away from virtual surround sound and instead stick standard audio, as intended by a game engine. Should I use my Creative Soundblaster Z or my Audioengine D1 DAC? From a gaming, quality, or performance standpoint, does the Creative card offer anything of value or my D1 DAC?

Here's what you do...

You try them both and you decide which you think sounds better.

The Creative card isn't going to be saving you CPU cycles and there's really no special tie ins with games for their cards these day. It might sound better than your D1 though, particularly driving your headphones, but that's something you can try out yourself and decide.

Don't waste time w/ "gaming" products. Like others have said there is no benefit to that, and they can be overpriced.

For a really nice DAC/amp, have a look at JDSLabs-- they have some very high quality and well priced products, and everything is built in the USA afaik. I rarely use headphones however, so I mainly use their ODAC.

Is the reason regular stereo headphones do so well with 3D positional audio because most gaming software employs a binaural recording/playback method similar to this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUDTlvagjJA

Admittedly I don't know much about virtual surround and how it is implemented. Is it this natural separation of sound with the delay time between output to the left and right channels in a video game that can give such great effect with little required in the way of virtualization software?

Apologies for little input to the ops original questions.

Spyder22446688 wrote:

So as a follow-up question: Let's say I decide to go with a standard, but quality, set of normal (non-gaming) headphones. Let's also say I stay away from virtual surround sound and instead stick standard audio, as intended by a game engine. Should I use my Creative Soundblaster Z or my Audioengine D1 DAC? From a gaming, quality, or performance standpoint, does the Creative card offer anything of value or my D1 DAC?

Compare running optical from the Z to the Audioengine versus just plugging the Audioengine DAC straight into USB, versus just using the sound card alone.

I'm currently quite happy with a pair of HD555's and my X-Fi Platinum for clarity and positioning, especially in FPS's.

Airmantharp wrote:

Compare running optical from the Z to the Audioengine versus just plugging the Audioengine DAC straight into USB, versus just using the sound card alone.

Also, does the motherboard have optical out? If so, you could try it to the D1 too, might not need the SoundBlaster.

Airmantharp wrote:

Compare running optical from the Z to the Audioengine versus just plugging the Audioengine DAC straight into USB, versus just using the sound card alone.

I'm currently quite happy with a pair of HD555's and my X-Fi Platinum for clarity and positioning, especially in FPS's.

For the DAC, can you explain the difference optical will make compared to USB? This never even occurred to me.

It doesn't, as both are digital signals. Optical might induce a touch less CPU load, though.

Spyder22446688 wrote:

Airmantharp wrote:

Compare running optical from the Z to the Audioengine versus just plugging the Audioengine DAC straight into USB, versus just using the sound card alone.

I'm currently quite happy with a pair of HD555's and my X-Fi Platinum for clarity and positioning, especially in FPS's.

For the DAC, can you explain the difference optical will make compared to USB? This never even occurred to me.

It depends on which audio driver you're using:

Optical out on the motherboard means using Realtek or something like it, optical off of a Soundblaster means using Creative's drivers, and USB off the DAC means using whatever the DAC defaults to that was included with Windows, which is likely the least molested option for music- but not necessarily the best for games or movies.

synthtel2 wrote:

It doesn't, as both are digital signals. Optical might induce a touch less CPU load, though.

And perhaps a touch less latency.

With my DT880s I tired the "virtual surround" thing of my Creative Titanium HD once... and once only.
It sounded absolutely horrible.

As a matter of fact the entire "gaming mode" preset sounds like crap in a tin can.
I let the card run in "audio creation" mode because that sounds clearest.

While I am not one of them signal purists (I have been known to use an EQ from time to time) I generally do think "less modification is more" in terms of quality.

Ifalna wrote:

With my DT880s I tired the "virtual surround" thing of my Creative Titanium HD once... and once only.

I'm not sure why you turned it on at all; its specific purpose is to take a source that can be independently set to >2.0 channels and downmix that to headphones, and is only useful for positioning when that source has good surround positioning but terrible HRTF and where positioning is critical- basically old games.

It's possible for games to be released that would still benefit from the feature, but as a Battlefield player myself, even the six year old Bad Company 2 release included an excellent Dolby sound implementation that is equally at home mixing to headphones or to 7.1 surround.

synthtel2 wrote:

It doesn't, as both are digital signals. Optical might induce a touch less CPU load, though.

This isn't strictly true. There are a variety of reasons why two different digital interfaces could result in different sounds. Jitter is one factor that can cause a difference. There are others. These are usually not huge impacts but they are real and measurable. The impact can be smaller or bigger depending on quality of the specific USB or Toslink implementations in your devices, the quality of which can vary significantly. And a device may have a clearly superior one between the two. NWavGuy had a good break down of this if you're interested.

http://nwavguy.blogspot.com/2011/02/jit ... atter.html

@OP: Your headphones are more than adequate. Get a DAC for them and you'll be fine.