what where the crap are they ah here we go
okay this should be fine so i'm gonna go through this door backwards
wait shoot he's behind me but where
come on i mean like i can tell he's like behind
me but i can't tell exactly where he is this sucks
oh what's this surround sound and a headset heck yeah
i can get into that hold on a minute you've still only got
two speakers i mean is it even any good
like surely you'd need oh so this is is full true 7.1 surround
sound in a headset look at it look at all this there's so many drivers in here
what is the best way to get surround sound out of a headset there's only one way to
find out by comparing them all
surround sound is nothing new i mean we've had quadrophonic records since the
70s and i mean it's nothing special right just add more speakers and boom
the sound is all around you easy
except not really unless the audio was recorded binaurally with dual
microphones positioned like human ears there's special processing required in
the studio to convert the mono audio that's typically recorded in sound
booths and movie sets or in youtube videos into stereo or
surround and traditionally this conversion has been a highly manual and
artistic process that locks down the
number of audio channels that are available but
current gen surround sound technologies like dolby atmos and dtsx get around
this channel hard lock limitation by
actually processing where a sound should
be in 3d space at the studio allowing
your receiver to take this information and then approximate that location as
best it can using whatever speakers it has available this technology is called
object-based surround and i'm bringing it up because it just so happens to be
very similar to how many games have processed their audio for years so what
nearly all of our surround sound headsets are doing is taking our game
audio or at minimum a surround audio stream with this positional data and
using what's called a head related transfer function or hrtf for short to
process it in such a way as to mimic the way that your ears perceive the
directionality of sound which is super complicated by the way and has to do
with like the curvatures of the growths on the side of your head and like all
that kind of stuff that's not the only way to do it though
that's right this here is the brute force method so this headset has five
drivers per ear to actually provide the
front rear side center and subwoofer
channels that you'd expect in a straight surround sound system firing directly
into your ear balls now the question here is
which one of these solutions is better
hrtf based surround makes a lot of sense that is as long as your head is roughly
the same size as the head that it was coded for and meanwhile true 7.1 methods
like razer's tmat 7.1 are potentially
agnostic to the shape of your head but all those extra speakers limit the
maximum size of the individual drivers and they add weight and complexity to
our setup besides we don't know yet if either of
these methods actually work so without
further ado then it's time for some science
in order to test these headsets we're going to use overwatch thanks to its
excellent surround mix the setup is simple load up the shooting range then grab
soldier 76 and sprint over next to these bots that shoot periodically
once here we'll blindfold our participant spin the viewport around
choose a headset at random and then have the test subject point out where they
think the shooting is coming from once that's done we'll have them take
the mouse and blindly aim at the bots since we only care about the horizontal
accuracy i'll adjust the vertical axis so we can measure how far away they are
from hitting the bots rinse and repeat then it's on to the
next victim so after tallying the results it seemed relatively random
whether or not most of the participants picked the right direction when it came
time to actually aim but there are at
least a few takeaways here starting with that dolby atmos for headphones which is
a software solution ended up with more direct hits than any other combination
while the razer man of war came in second also the clear loser here is the razer
tmat 7.1 where more often than not the
target was actually completely off screen maybe there is really nothing to
the true 7.1 thing after all now when it comes to pointing out the source of a
sound though the best results came from the logitech g933 and the ASUS rog strix
fusion 700 with an average variation of only six percent across all of our tests
which is less than half of the overall average our control stereo headset sat
at just under 12 with every other contender except for
dolby atmos for headphones ending up being actually worse
poor razor interestingly even with our
admittedly small sample size it quickly became clear that the people who were
more accustomed to headphone gaming tended to be the best at zeroing in on
where they thought a sound was coming from which makes sense given the
sweeping pattern they employ while ironically enough everybody else seemed
to have better results when pointing out the initial direction perhaps as a
result of the gamers being very accustomed to their own setups
it's hard to say for certain for now though let's get back to the question at
hand are surround gaming headphones bs
according to our testing the answer is
mostly with the exception of ASUS proprietary
solution the most successful things we tried were all either dolby or dts based
so done in software which tells me that
there really is no such thing as a good surround gaming headset i mean ASUS
comes with rog motherboards and you can even buy dolby atmos for headphones on
the Windows store with a dts option coming soon and those can be applied to
any stereo headphones which means that the real answer is something that
many of you probably already knew if you want the best gaming audio then you just
get good audio there's no such thing as
gaming headphones just good headphones paired with the processing solution that
works best for you and the good news about that is that these software
solutions actually tend to have free trials or in razer's case are even
actually free outright so then with audio being such a subjective experience
it's on you guys to try it out with your own headphones and your own ears and
find your sweet spot so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video
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