This quest of mine all started when I decided that I wanted some new headphones for gaming on my PC as I found my current set (Roccat Kaves) a little too heavy and uncomfortable after extended playtime. I started looking around online in the usual places (Overclockers UK) and found that they had a decent selection of gaming headsets, then my head started to hurt.
There were headsets which had USB connections, a single 3.5mm connection, a full 3 x 3.5mm connections, stereo headphones, “hardware” 5.1 headphones, “virtual” 5.1 headphones, “virtual” 7.1 headphones… My god, I think my head exploded.
After spending some time collecting the pieces of brain-matter from around my room I decided that I needed some help, so I decided to do some research. Here’s a summary of what I found:
Firstly, all sound produced by your games / music is digital (unless you’ve got a PCI record player!?) so at some point that digital signal needs to be processed and converted into an analogue signal. This needs to happen because speakers and headphones are both analogue devices, they don’t read 1′s and 0′s, they need a waveform.
So your game produces some digital gunfire, this then gets passed on to your sound card (assuming you have one, if not it’s probably passed to an on-board audio chip) to deal with. At this point your sound card can do one of three things:
- Convert the digital signal into an analogue waveform and output it via the 3.5mm jacks.
- Leave the digital signal alone and output whatever it can digitally over an optical/coax link.
- Encode the digital signal into a Dolby format (such as Dolby Digital) and output it over the optical/coax.
Of these options I imagine 99.999% of PC users fall into category 1. Using this option means that your sound card is working as a DAC (Digital-to-Analogue Converter) which has some drawbacks; you are totally dependant on the quality of your sound card’s conversion for the quality of sound you get out from it. If you’ve got a good sound card (such as a Creative X-Fi or Asus Xonar) then the conversion should be pretty good, but if you’re using an on-board audio chip the quality of the conversion can be awful. Even the good sound cards aren’t considered “great” because of the limitations they have to work with; being inside a computer is inherently a very noisy place (electrically speaking), with a lot of EMI flying about.
Option 2 sounds like a reasonable one, until you factor in that unless audio is encoded in a major format (ie. Dolby Digital) the optical standard only allows 2-channel sound to be sent un-encoded through it. That means that all of the digital information that was meant for the side, rear, centre and bass speakers is effectively lost. Eak! Obviously this isn’t a very good set-up for gaming as you want to be able to hear what’s going on behind you and those ear-trembling bass notes.
Option 3 requires you to have a sound-card that is capable of encoding to a major format on-the-fly. Generally, this means that the sound card will need to be a higher end model. This option allows all of the digital channels to be output over the optical/coax connection.
However, both option 2 and 3 simply “pass-the-buck” as it were; the digital signal still needs to be converted, it’s just that the sound card isn’t the one that ends up doing it. This has some advantages and disadvantages, which I’ll come to later on in this series.
11:42 am, January 26, 2011skyfire /
Definitely a good read and i look forward to part 2
I can perfectly understand the head hurting despite all the help you have given on my thread on Overclockers.
11:47 am, January 26, 2011Siyfion /
I’m glad you found it useful! Just to warn you though, my quest for ultimate headphone audio may well end up with a lose/lose scenario! As with most things there’s bound to be some sort of trade-off to be made somewhere along the path to headphone-heaven.
12:18 pm, January 26, 2011skyfire /
yeah i realise this and the lose scenario is generally down to lack of funds
12:32 pm, January 26, 2011Siyfion /
Well to be honest I’ll be happy if I can find a “perfect” solution, even if it costs a bomb. At least that way I can have something to aim for as I upgrade stuff and any sacrifices I make will only be due to costs, not performance.
5:57 pm, March 2, 2011aimology /
As a very competitive online gaming for the past 15 years I have tested many many heads. I agree on a lot of things youre saying except for a few. USB headsets I agree blow. I bought and use recently the logitech g35s. These headsets seriously blow when it comes to video games and surround sound, especially in a game like quakelive / cod. I also have tested some top notch platronics and sony which also, blew. Same with icemat and steel series. The best gaming headset I’ve used to date with surround sound has been the Zalman headset, funny also because they are also the cheapest. They also make the best microphone which can clip to anything. I used a sound blaster gamerz sound card thats pretty old for all of the cards except for ones that were usb. I’m actually wanting to sell my logitechs and move on to something else to test. Looking for idea’s I came across your site after searching my favorite site ( hi fi ). You did alot of the work for me, so thanks for short cutting it. I debating on trying the corsair or razor or going with something way more audiophile like senn or bay…. so many options. I dont think people realize how important sound truely is in video games and have no idea how good a real setup can be and up your gaming level.