Nachiket

What do you think RTINGS about this technology, and are you going to test it?

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I feel like I have to make this post after I nearly cringed to death after seeing a number of wrong comments on the subject. So let me explain what it is and why you should use it. Virtual surround sound is the conversion of a surround sound source to binaural audio for headphones. Binaural audio has things called HRTFs, which improve the imaging on headphones. You can think of HRTFs as analogous to depth perception in vision, where each eye sees something a little different, and the composite has depth information. Similarly, spatial hearing has each ear hearing a slightly different version of something, and the differences are the spatial information. What the virtual surround DSP does, is it sees the 7.1 channels the game is outputting, and for each of the 7 directional channels, it adds in the differences between ears (the HRTF) that is appropriate for that channel’s location. Now if you had actual 7.1 speakers (not headphones), the physical location of the speakers would provide the appropriate HRTF. But since you are using headphones, you have to use the DSP. So with an appreciation of what virtual surround sound is, it is fairly straight forward to understand why you would want it. A 7.1 source is obviously going to be more spatially detailed than 2.0, and the virtual surround sound dsp is going to allow you to listen to it on headphones, through the use of HRTFs.

I know you know a lot about this subject, but a lot of reviewers actually don’t recommend using this 7.1 surround sound. Like I said a bad implementation can make it sound robotic or unnatural, and although it increases the soundstage, it really does nothing to imaging because in competitive games there’s really no benefit of using this technology other than open world games where the increased soundstage adds to the experience. So, no I’m not going to use it I’m more of an fps type of gamer, and yes I have experienced it, I found that it works really well in Just Cause 4, and not in games like fortnite. Either way, you can’t really call a 2 channel headphone a 7.1 surround sound headphone, because it only has 2 DRIVERS and it uses sofware to create the effect. I know there’s ‘TRUE’ 7.1 surround headphones but I’m not buying a headphones because of that technology, and in my opinion an open back headphones is way superior because of the open drivers, which produces a more natural, spacious soundstage.