What is Virtual Headphone Surround?

Home Theater

Headphones with multiple drivers

Virtual Surround Processing

I’ve never expected much from virtual surround solutions that rely on a single speaker in each can to create positional audio. During game testing, though, I actually did hear things behind me, and instinctively turned to face them based on the perceived source. That was a big surprise that, for me, helped validate the legitimacy of virtual surround sound. In fact, I have to say that it didn’t really make a difference whether the headset included four drivers in each ear or just one. In both cases, I was able to discern where sounds were coming from more effectively. Click to expand...

3D vs 2D surround

mad lust envy said: NOTE: At 1:08, this is pretty much how Dolby headphone sounds on the Mixamp. The 5.1 DH: On section at 0:54 sounds like a weaker version, which honestly doesn't sound like the Mixamp's DH, but it still showcases positional cues. Now, if you didn't believe in DH before, you probably will now. Remember: At 1:08-2:00 is pretty much how the Mixamp sounds. Click to expand...

Most important: does it work for your ears?

There are already some great guides about how to use this, check out Mad Lust Envy's headphone reviews for console gaming with a Mixamp and NamelessPFG's Computer Gaming guide for info on PC gaming with sound cards . But what is this tech anyway, and are all types the same?In short: No.Let's start with the kind everyone is most familiar with, a 5.1 home theater surround setup. This is most like the experience you get at a movie theater, with speakers in a ring around you and a subwoofer (sometimes more than one) somewhere too (sub bass tends to not be "directional," so that's why one is standard). For the purposes of this guide, 5.1, 7.1, and theater setups are functionally the same idea: set up a bunch of speakers around you, so that a driver can literally fire a sound from a particular direction. Pros of this method are that the effect is quite believable and naturally works well for anyone not deaf (my apologies to those deaf or partially deaf), it's therefore immersive and instinctive. The cons, as are already familiar to Head-Fi'ers, speakers get very expensive especially compared to the bang-for-buck of headphones, setup and placement is fussy and odd-shaped rooms can mess things up, you've got wires everywhere, and then there's the thing most people don't even realize:I'll get into that more later.These headphones basically take the 5.1 surround concept and stuff it into headphones. Usually, there are a pair of drivers each for rear, front, and sometimes sides (7.1). The "Center" channel from a home-theater setup is usually played in equal strength in both of the "Front" drivers. Seems logical that this would work well, right? Well, the surround effect usually is ok (still 2D), but having so many drivers in the same earcup produces problems. I think the problems are mainly down to resonance, interference, and just the fact that none of these drivers are particularly designed to sound great because your purchase price is split between the cost of them all. Overall, this type of headphone surround is IMO a novelty, and I'd recommend passing.This DOES work, very well. Considering most humans are only equipped with two ears, two headphone drivers just off the surface of those two ears, with the proper tuning, be able to sound like it's coming from any direction. But don't just take my word for it, here's an excerpt from Tom's Hardware doing a round-up of headphones expressly made for gaming surround:Source: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/surround-sound-headset-benchmark,3125.html There are a number of different processing algorithms that can simulate the effect a certain direction has on a noise. A sound is affected by direction in a similar way as as sound is affected by being behind a door:There are several different processing methods, but I'd split them into two groups: one common in home theater receivers that mixes 5.1 or 7.1 channel audio into headphone surround, the other only found in PCs that haschannels and can simulate direction fromangle.•Dolby Headphone (used in Astro Mixamp, the original Turtle Beach DSS, Marantz receivers, and all Asus' gaming soundcards), the most common•DTS Headphone X (an emerging method, this processing offers up to 11 directions... 7.1 plus 4 height channels above, as of Nov20th one Turtle Beach wireless headphone has been released with support built-in)•AMBEO (Sennheiser’s height-aware Processing, also Binaural Headphone recording)•Cirrus Logic headphone surround (Used in the Turtle Beach DSS2, I might have the name wrong for now)•Razer Surround (software based, runs in the background on your PC)•Proprietary Headphone Virtual Surround DSPs (including Yamaha's branded "Silent Cinema" and others from Sony, Pioneer, Denon, etc)•TrueAudio (Used in select AMD graphics cards and the PS4)•Direct3Dsurround (Microsoft's brief-lived surround algorithm for Windows XP)•OpenAL (formerly open-source before taken over by Creative, this forms the core of the 3D surround in Creative's sound cards, OpenAL is an available option in select PC titles)•SBX Pro Studio (Used in Creative's Z series soundcards) 720p Sample •THX TruStudio Pro (Used in Creative's Recon3D series soundcards, recently added to the Titanium HD)•THX Spacial Surround ( Sample •CMSS-3D (Used in Creative's X-Fi series soundcards)•Rapture3D•MyEars (Downloaded from the MyEars website, Reviewed *Note: these algorithms CAN process full 3D surround IF IT'S AVAILABLE IN THE GAME, else you hear 2D surround or stereo.Gaming consoles like PS3 and Xbox 360 only use 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound (because the mfrs expect that people would only use them with speakers, in a home-theater setup). My receiver from Yamaha has Silent Cinema processing built-in, most other brands have their own surround processing. Though the feature is usually buried away in the manual, usually you just have to plug in your headphone and activate any DSP to get it working. Dolby Headphone processing is used in a few receivers as well (Marantz, some discontinued Harman Kardon), and even some stand-alone processing units made for gaming like the Astro Mixamp and Turtle Beach's original DSS. Here is an example video with Dolby Headphone already processed and baked-in — use headphones and try it out!Dolby Headphone was designed for movies, though some PC soundcards like those from Asus feature it too. If you really want to get the most accurate directionality though, PC-designed 3D audio processing like CMSS-3D, THX TruStudio Pro, SBX Pro Studio, and Rapture3D all can dynamically apply direction cues to any sound, no matter which direction it comes from. Here is a sample of CMSS-3D (originally shown to me by Fegefeuer):Not only does it work (I enjoy it all the time), but "virtual" headphone surround has the potential to be MORE accurate than any of the "home theater" methods, because there are no directional "channels" to funnel directional cues into. So, virtual surround cues can smoothly emulate sound coming from any angle, including from above and below! Sure, sometimes a movie might have 7.1 audio set up so that two speakers can be slightly higher than your main fronts, but almost no console game takes advantage of this. Mere 5.1 isadequate, but in terms of gaming and especially with console FPS like CoD, sometimes you'll think you're hearing someone behind a wall, but he's actually downstairs. Horror games also tend to have things skittering around all over the place, and flight-sims need no explanation.So, I tend to think of the typical 5.1 surround setup as "2D surround," because the sound merely wraps around you in a circle, rather than a sphere. 90% of the time, 2D will still be impressive, but just... not... quite... realistic. Sadly, since consoles (so far) do not have the hardware and software to support 3D surround, and since the majority of gamers use consoles (and smartphones) these days, many games forget about 3D audio during the design phase and concentrate on a "home theater" (read: 5.1 channel audio) experience.However, 3D surroundstill being used in some games on the PC platform... The most notable recent example I've heard about is OpenAL support in Borderlands 2. Watch out for Rakk!The new PS4 and Xbox One consoles have dedicated audio processing hardware, which brings the industry several new benefits! Across the board, this sets a new bar that new games can dedicate more resources to audio quality and processing (and with Blu-Ray being standard, audio won't need as much compression either).The Xbox One is calling their hardware something like "Sphere" which I will expand upon as I learn more, so games will have dedicated hardware resources for audio, but the downsides of that console is it doesn't support Dolby surround through optical-out AND has a new proprietary connection for chat headsets, meaning previous-gen setups are unsupported. Since the One does support DTS-HD though, it's possible/likely that we will see new adapters with DTS Headphone X in the future. The "above" height channels are an improvement over previous 5.1/7.1 channel arrays, more 3D, but I still classify this as "Theater" surround as there is no "below" channels and, critically, this is still a system based on shunting sound through channels rather than mathematically angling the sound from any 3D direction.I'm going to come out and say it... The PS4's audio capabilities have me really excited. Not only can the PS4 still bitstream Dolby out through optical so existing devices can still be used, but AMD's TrueAudio performs fully 3D audio positional calculations before being split into channels, and it can easily be incorporated by developers into new games because they can use existing plug-in tools like FMOD and Wwise seen in many games today... but obviously,like to see it processed straight to a stereo headphone mix. The other big win is AMD got it into the PS4, not just their PC graphics cards (but those too), so developers know there will be a large base of users equipped with TrueAudio. They can really make their games stand out by leveraging TrueAudio, and I'm all for that!One last thing I've noticed: some people get the surround effect no matter what kind of processing is used, but others disagree on what sounds most believable, and still others can't intuitively feel the effect at all and prefer to stick with stereo. For me, THX TruStudio Pro works the most intuitively, with Dolby Headphone in second, Silent Cinema makes a round surround circle but relies on reverb which annoys me and doesn't pan well from behind-to-front, and CMSS-3D (from YouTube vids at least) only presents 3D imaging some of the time (though EAX and occlusion effects work very well). NamelessPFG, on the other hand, only has a full experience with CMSS-3D (on his very nice Stax headphones). And then Mad Lust Envy is a total champion of Dolby Headphone, and no other processing algorithm does rear cues well for him! Which of us is right? I don't think any of us, or more correctly, we'reright about which sounds best to our different ears.So, dear reader, you owe it to yourself to take some time, listen to the samples posted above, and figure out where YOU'LL get the most mileagePlease reply what you think. Also, I would GREATLY appreciate someone posting a how-to or link about how I could record a video, using my Recon3D USB sound card, with the TruStudio Pro processing baked in, so I can provide a good example of that. The one video on YouTube in Battlefield 3 was set up wrong... Both methods of surround processing used were fed only stereo audio to guess at a surround mix, and BF3 (sadly) has good quality sound recordings but poor positional cues.I purchased a Creative Sound Blaster Z to check out SBX ProStudio for myself, but I still don't know how to capture a sample for you guys :/ It's a factor of time restraints and how I choose to spend my limited time off work. I'll still review it though.