darn it, just tell me what to buy.
Good headphones. Even without HRTF they are worth it.
Surround Sound in Headphones
61–70 of 107 posts
Re: Surround Sound in Headphones
#62i went to a qualcomm presentation at CES a decade ago where they demoed surround sound with basic cheap stereo cans and it was impressive as hell. i was always surprised it never seemed to take off as a general thing.
my 2 cents is that it's really tough to market high quality audio despite a clear market willing to buy high quality audio. There are dozens of ostensibly high quality brands selling 500 dollar headphones with drastically different audio quality. The audiophile community would often have you believe that all such headphones are junk and a random small brand has the best headphones of all. At least tvs have color accu…
Just because a brand isn't "mainstream" doesn't mean they're small.
the root of the issue is audio is highly subjective so what sounds good for you may sound awful for me. Confound that with other variables such as amps and dacs (tubes, class A, "warm" vs "cold") and it's a total mess.
Second headphones ARE measured with a clear metric, you have frequency response graphs and distortion graphs which paint a objective picture about how the headphones sound.
Re: Surround Sound in Headphones
#63I have a 5.1 surround system (with real speakers around me) and I find the lack of surround support in games sad. How come not any game supports output to a surround system - they have their sound sources in a 3D environment and should be able to mix a sound output with arbtrary speaker setup ?
Many (most?) PC games support surround sound. (Re another comment: Fortnite supposedly supports both 5.1 and 7.1. I have not tried it.)
But primarily via the analog audio outputs on the back of a PC motherboard.
If you've hooked your PC into your surround sound setup via HDMI, optical cable, or other single connection method, it is unlikely to work.
If your surround sound amp supports per-channel analog in and your PC has 5.1 or 7.1 out support, you can use 4 or 6 (5.1 / 7.1) 1/8" stereo to RCA cables to connect your PC to your surround sound system. Depending on your TV / surround sound system, you may need to mess with delay settings to get the audio to sync with the video. Having your TV and surround sound system set to "game mode" may help. Hooking your PC output directly to the TV may also help.
My understanding is using DTS, Dolby Atmos, etc to encode / decode surround sound requires paying licensing fees. These aren't paid by Microsoft as a part of Windows, by the gaming framework companies for their Windows games, etc.
I suspect Microsoft and Sony handle the fees for their consoles, but I do not know for certain. It's possible they require game makers to pay them.
Edited for clarity.
Re: Surround Sound in Headphones
#64Thief the dark project supports HRTF through OpenAL Soft[0].
Head related transfer function is the.. modeling of how sound waves bounce of your body (shoulders, ears, breast). And it's a part of how we determine where a sound is coming from. Other part is the timing, as in the difference of phase of sound coming in one and in the other ear. Amplitude(volume) is also a part, probably, but we are much more sensitive to difference in phase then amplitude.
If you want to start researching in these things; the start is probably "impulse response" as well as.. a lot really (systems and signals is a heavy book that i should read one day). Just remember that everything is a spring.
As for practical modeling in 3D games and such. The problem is almost the same as global illumination. You would need to model the whole environment and how it responds to sound (absorption, reflection, idk probably even the speed of sound in various materials to be accurate). A great youtube person has a couple videos on whitepapers about this [1-2](the 2 is more practical). Valve bought a company that played with these things, but idk if anything came out of it (iirc it is part of the steam framework now).
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW-W3A2l5UE
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzsZ2qMtEUE
[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mx8viOFKiIs
PS Headphones are better then 5.1/7.1 for surround sound, mostly because of room acoustics.
Re: Surround Sound in Headphones
#65I have a 5.1 surround system (with real speakers around me) and I find the lack of surround support in games sad. How come not any game supports output to a surround system - they have their sound sources in a 3D environment and should be able to mix a sound output with arbtrary speaker setup ?
Like the other comments I'm confused, pretty much any game I've played for the past few years supports surround sound, most of them 7.1 even.
What I don't understand is why Dolby Atmos is not used much more for games. Xbox One and PC support it but only very few titles use it. PS4 and PS5 don't support it all for games (only for video content), despite all Sony's bragging about their dedication to PS5 audio. Dolby Atmos seems perfect for games, for developers because it effortlessly maps audio directly to any 3D position in space, and for users because it scales all the way from headphones to soundbars to full 7.4.2 setups.
I was royally pissed off to learn PS5 would not natively support Dolby Atmos, I have a full 7.4.1 home-theater setup with height speakers and movies and Dolby Atmos demo's sound absolutely awesome. Yet if I play games the best I can get is 7.1 which is nice, but the height speakers go totally unused. It's probably related to licensing costs, but it is extremely disappointing having waited for the PS5 for so long and not seeing any kind of upgrade to the audio.
Re: Surround Sound in Headphones
#66I have a 5.1 surround system (with real speakers around me) and I find the lack of surround support in games sad. How come not any game supports output to a surround system - they have their sound sources in a 3D environment and should be able to mix a sound output with arbtrary speaker setup ?
per other comments: It seems I am wrong on the support of 7.1 sound on PC games. I have to look into it again and see why it does not enable or show up in my game settings menu's
Re: Surround Sound in Headphones
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi, we don't sell headsets. Our software works with any pair of headphones. Really the comparison is how well does our personalized HRTFs perform for you compared to the generic HRTF that comes with PUBG. And I think this is a question that is better answered with a demo than a forum reply. Please give Immerse a try, we have free trials for everything.
> Our software works with any pair of headphones. On mobile it looks the gaming version of Immerse is only available for headphones made by a few manufacturers. Which version should I choose for AKG or Sennheiser?
Not only on mobile. What would I get for a Steelseries headset?
Re: Surround Sound in Headphones
#68Thief the dark project supports HRTF through OpenAL Soft[0]. Head related transfer function is the.. modeling of how sound waves bounce of your body (shoulders, ears, breast). And it's a part of how we determine where a sound is coming from. Other part is the timing, as in the difference of phase of sound coming in one and in the other ear. Amplitude(volume) is also a part, probably, but we are much more sensitive to…
I began to write an acerbic comment at "everything is a spring". I then thought about it, and realised you're so right. Linear algebra is crazy. Thank you for the insight. (It struck me that all of quantum mechanics I've ever studied in university was about learning to solve more sophisticated harmonic osciollators.)
Re: Surround Sound in Headphones
#69Now that tactical shooters have gone from a hardcore gamer niche to arguably the primary way many teenagers hang out with peers, good spatial sound is a huge opportunity. If someone could make $200 headphones where you could easily perceive if someone was above you or below you in Fortnite or Warzone, you would have a billion dollar company. As it is, most of us need visual indicators to tell where a nearby gunshot on the same level as us came from.
Re: Surround Sound in Headphones
#70HRTFs are awesome, but I really wish we could have an open standard here and not a dozen competing proprietary ones. It feels like you really just need a standard way to encode the position of multiple audio tracks in 3D space and let your implementation of choice do the spatialization for you. Anyway, fun fact: OpenAL Soft has an implementation of this. If any games you play use it (Minecraft notably does) you can g…
> a standard way to encode the position of multiple audio tracks in 3D space
Isn't that the idea behind Ambisonics [1], which OpenAL Soft is based on?