Gadgetory

what the crap are they not here we go okay this should be fine so I'm gonna go through this door backwards wait shoot it's behind me before where come on I mean like I can tell he's like behind me but I can't tell exactly where he is it sucks oh what's this surround sound in a head sack heck yeah I can get into that hold on a minute you still only got two speakers I mean is it even any good it's like surely you'd need Oh so this is is full true 7.1 surround sound in a headset look at 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 are you looking for an affordable and reliable VPN well private Internet access has got your back they encrypt your internet traffic and use a safe protected IP check it out today at the link below surround sound is nothing new I mean we've had quadrophonic records since the 70s and I mean there's nothing special right just add more speakers and boom the sound is all around you'd easy haha except not really unless the audio was recorded binaural e with dual microphones positioned like human ears they're 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 DTS X 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 HRT F 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 her 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 a chart CF 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 coated for and meanwhile true 7.1 methods like razors TM at 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 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 you periodically once here will 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 and 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 said 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 TM at 7.1 we're more often than not the target was actually completely off screen nothing to the true seven-point-one thing after all now when it comes to pointing out the source of a sound though the best results came from the logitech g930 3 and the asus rog Strix fusion 700 with an average variation of only 6% 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 razer 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 our 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 Razors 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 headphone and your own ears and find your sweet spot could listening inspire you to start something new well audible can help you out with their exclusive audible originals that feature exclusive audio titles created by celebrated storytellers from worlds as diverse as theatre journalism literature and more and you can get your first audiobook for free when you give audible a try for 30 days just go to audible.com slash Linus or text Linus to five hundred five hundred one book that we suggest that is only available on audible is cracking the tech career this audiobook provides great advice on career paths in the technology industry and also about how to make your application the most attractive one in the pile so again that's audible.com slash Linus or txt Linus to five hundred five hundred so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join