WEBVTT

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what where the crap are they ah here we go

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okay this should be fine so i'm gonna go through this door backwards

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wait shoot he's behind me but where

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come on i mean like i can tell he's like behind

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me but i can't tell exactly where he is this sucks

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oh what's this surround sound and a headset heck yeah

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i can get into that hold on a minute you've still only got

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two speakers i mean is it even any good

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like surely you'd need oh so this is is full true 7.1 surround

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sound in a headset look at it look at all this there's so many drivers in here

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what is the best way to get surround sound out of a headset there's only one way to

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find out by comparing them all

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surround sound is nothing new i mean we've had quadrophonic records since the

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70s and i mean it's nothing special right just add more speakers and boom

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the sound is all around you easy

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except not really unless the audio was recorded binaurally with dual

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microphones positioned like human ears there's special processing required in

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the studio to convert the mono audio that's typically recorded in sound

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booths and movie sets or in youtube videos into stereo or

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surround and traditionally this conversion has been a highly manual and

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artistic process that locks down the

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number of audio channels that are available but

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current gen surround sound technologies like dolby atmos and dtsx get around

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this channel hard lock limitation by

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actually processing where a sound should

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be in 3d space at the studio allowing

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your receiver to take this information and then approximate that location as

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best it can using whatever speakers it has available this technology is called

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object-based surround and i'm bringing it up because it just so happens to be

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very similar to how many games have processed their audio for years so what

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nearly all of our surround sound headsets are doing is taking our game

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audio or at minimum a surround audio stream with this positional data and

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using what's called a head related transfer function or hrtf for short to

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process it in such a way as to mimic the way that your ears perceive the

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directionality of sound which is super complicated by the way and has to do

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with like the curvatures of the growths on the side of your head and like all

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that kind of stuff that's not the only way to do it though

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that's right this here is the brute force method so this headset has five

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drivers per ear to actually provide the

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front rear side center and subwoofer

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channels that you'd expect in a straight surround sound system firing directly

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into your ear balls now the question here is

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which one of these solutions is better

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hrtf based surround makes a lot of sense that is as long as your head is roughly

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the same size as the head that it was coded for and meanwhile true 7.1 methods

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like razer's tmat 7.1 are potentially

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agnostic to the shape of your head but all those extra speakers limit the

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maximum size of the individual drivers and they add weight and complexity to

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our setup besides we don't know yet if either of

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these methods actually work so without

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further ado then it's time for some science

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in order to test these headsets we're going to use overwatch thanks to its

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excellent surround mix the setup is simple load up the shooting range then grab

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soldier 76 and sprint over next to these bots that shoot periodically

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once here we'll blindfold our participant spin the viewport around

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choose a headset at random and then have the test subject point out where they

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think the shooting is coming from once that's done we'll have them take

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the mouse and blindly aim at the bots since we only care about the horizontal

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accuracy i'll adjust the vertical axis so we can measure how far away they are

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from hitting the bots rinse and repeat then it's on to the

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next victim so after tallying the results it seemed relatively random

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whether or not most of the participants picked the right direction when it came

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time to actually aim but there are at

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least a few takeaways here starting with that dolby atmos for headphones which is

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a software solution ended up with more direct hits than any other combination

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while the razer man of war came in second also the clear loser here is the razer

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tmat 7.1 where more often than not the

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target was actually completely off screen maybe there is really nothing to

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the true 7.1 thing after all now when it comes to pointing out the source of a

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sound though the best results came from the logitech g933 and the ASUS rog strix

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fusion 700 with an average variation of only six percent across all of our tests

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which is less than half of the overall average our control stereo headset sat

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at just under 12 with every other contender except for

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dolby atmos for headphones ending up being actually worse

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poor razor interestingly even with our

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admittedly small sample size it quickly became clear that the people who were

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more accustomed to headphone gaming tended to be the best at zeroing in on

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where they thought a sound was coming from which makes sense given the

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sweeping pattern they employ while ironically enough everybody else seemed

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to have better results when pointing out the initial direction perhaps as a

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result of the gamers being very accustomed to their own setups

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it's hard to say for certain for now though let's get back to the question at

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hand are surround gaming headphones bs

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according to our testing the answer is

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mostly with the exception of ASUS proprietary

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solution the most successful things we tried were all either dolby or dts based

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so done in software which tells me that

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there really is no such thing as a good surround gaming headset i mean ASUS

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comes with rog motherboards and you can even buy dolby atmos for headphones on

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the Windows store with a dts option coming soon and those can be applied to

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any stereo headphones which means that the real answer is something that

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many of you probably already knew if you want the best gaming audio then you just

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get good audio there's no such thing as

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gaming headphones just good headphones paired with the processing solution that

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works best for you and the good news about that is that these software

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solutions actually tend to have free trials or in razer's case are even

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actually free outright so then with audio being such a subjective experience

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it's on you guys to try it out with your own headphones and your own ears and

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find your sweet spot so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video

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you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the

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stuff we featured at the link in the video description also down there is our

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merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which

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you should totally join