At the dawn of Windows as a gaming platform, Microsoft was a great pioneer with their frequent iterations of DirectX. Of particular interest was DirectSound3D, which gave rise to an interface of arbitrarily complex audio setups that games could utilize. Various hardware vendors took advantage of this and offered sound cards capable of producing binaural headphone audio in real-time. This culminated in the release of the Xbox, which packed powerful 3D audio processing capabilities in its silicon.
All of this momentum was however halted with the release of the Xbox 360 and the approach of Windows Vista. Microsoft had decided that 3D audio processing belonged to the domain of software, and it was up to game developers to explicitly support various output setups. This meant that headphone users were often neglected, thus they had to rely on bespoke surround sound virtualization solutions to make the best use of their own setup.
The industry however decided that vendor-provided solutions to generic 3D audio was once again on the table, and so games would be able to interface with technologies like Dolby Atmos and DTS:X to facilitate arbitrarily complex audio setups, including headphones.
The result of all this is that that there is no universally agreed upon standard on how to do headphone audio in games. Do you want the best audio in Counter-Strike? No worries, it has HRTF processing built right into the game. Do you also want the best possible audio in Call of Duty? That's not happening without a Dolby license. Do you in addition want to play an older game from 2011 in its full glory? Consider buying a Sennheiser GSX 1200 for that specific use case.
On the Series X you had to previously buy a Atmos license for headsets. They've recently changed that I believe.
I broke down recently and put in a simple 5.1.2 system and ditched the headsets finally. Between the issues you describe, horrible build quality and connection issues... The Pulse Elite stands out there; since launch it wouldn't' stay connected for more than 3 mins.
The past few years I've been content with simply using Sony's virtual surround solutions from PS3 and onwards by way of their own headsets (that is when I don't just default to using the TV's speakers). When playing on PC, I just connect stereo headphones to the green jack and just mess with the volume as necessary lol.
@Hustler_One You should consider using Windows Sonic. It's not very good, but it can do some rudimentary virtualized surround sound. One issue is that it uses a very precarious heuristic to detect games, and many older titles refuse to work with it for whatever reason. Something as simple as using a specific version of an XAudio2 demo from the DirectX SDK made the difference for me.
@Enokilis I'll keep that in mind, I do hope someday I can build a VR capable rig for use with the PSVR2 and having virtual surround would definitely be desirable.
I've always known that Sennheiser GSX DAC was considered to be legendary but I've never fully understood what differentiates it from the rest. I was actually just looking for one a few weeks on random whim and found Sennheiser discontinued that along with it's EPOS line of headsets.
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Topic: The frustrating wasteland of headphone game audio
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