Virtual Surround Sound Headphones Suck… Here’s why

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One of the main selling points of this Corsair HS80 headset was the inclusion of the Dolby Access app. It claims to be “a leap beyond surround sound”, but if every other ‘digital 7.1 surround sound’ feature on a set of headphones is anything to go by, I somewhat doubt it. I haven’t tried this at all yet, so let’s fire up Cyberpunk, one of the few titles actually supported, and see what it’s like.

Now playing an open world story mode game is all well and good, but what about something fast paced, online and in theory could use a competitive advantage? Let’s try COD Cold War as that’s also a supported title.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, that wasn’t a complete revolution in my gaming experience. But why not? First, you need to know how it’s meant to work. Long story short, your ears and brain are amazing. You can distinguish left from right by a few key factors, all absolutely minute but critical to your ability to localise (find) an audio source.

The first one is the time difference between a sound hitting one ear and reaching the other. The speed of sound is around 340 m/s at sea level, meaning a sound coming from your left perpendicular to you takes around 6 ms longer to hit your right ear than to hit your left. That’s not long at all, but your brain can use that time difference to tell which side it’s coming from. Apparently humans can process an interaural time difference of as little as 10 microseconds, or 0.00001 seconds. That’s insane.

Then there is the volume difference, depending on your environment, that sound from the left is more likely to be quieter when it hits your right ear so your brain can process that difference too. Plus your ears are shaped quite particularly, as each of the creases reflects sound in a specific way depending on what angle the sound hits it at, and your brain has a map of how those reflections translate to position in 3D space.

There are some limitations, like the “cone of confusion”, which is basically a 15° cone perpendicular to each ear where you can’t tell for sure where a sound is coming from. That’s because a sound that’s fully perpendicular can’t get round and into your other ear well (without significant reflections like indoors), so your brain can’t use the interaural time and level differences to distinguish location. This is especially important for virtual surround headphones, since they are exclusively piping audio into your ears perpendicularly, meaning exact location especially in height and front/back position generally can’t be processed.

That means all you are left with is binaural, or left/right, processing which limits the immersion significantly. It means you can’t hear someone creaking the floorboards above you, or sneaking in a door below you, or even the difference between a grenade rolling to your feet on the floor or rolling on a long table towards you, all you’ll know is if it’s to your left or right.

Another limitation is that most of the surround sound solutions are based on a generic head-related transfer function – basically a generalised idea of how big your head is, what shape your ears are and how you process sound. People with dramatically different head sizes or ear shapes will often have a much worse experience with virtual surround headphones because the effect just isn’t designed for them.

It’s also worth noting that headphones like these don’t track your head position, but since the spatial audio is being calculated based on your virtual camera position, you can move but your audio world won’t. That can be jarring, and quickly remove any level of immersion the feature provides. Imagine a VR headset that doesn’t track your head movement and move the virtual camera accordingly – that’s what’s happening here but with sound.

In games, surround sound can be done in a few ways, the most advanced being this kind of dedicated integration like Dolby Atmos. It treats each of the sound sources as objects, and places those objects in a virtual grid then renders the audio based on their location from you. This, in theory, is the best implementation as it’s able to dynamically render sounds in 3D space from continuously variable positions, intensities and directions, but in practice the limitation of using headphones is pretty big and Atmos has a hard limit on the number of objects it can process at 128. That sounds like a lot, but when each car that drives by you on the street, every NPC, your own footsteps and the in-world sounds like sparks, gun fire and sirens are all their own objects you might run into that cap sooner than you’d think.

You can also take more standard surround sound signals like 5.1 or 7.1 and pipe them into your surround sound software to have it output that effect from your headphones, or even have the software approximate sounds to where it thinks they should be, but in practice these aren’t as good as native integrations like Atmos. The trouble is, Atmos itself not only isn’t free (if you don’t buy these headphones, otherwise it’s $15) but it’s one of many competing standards which includes DTSx, Sony Tempest Engine and a whole load more, so game and app support is mixed at best.

Dolby Atmos supports around 35 games on PC or Xbox right now, and a handful of streaming platforms which does include Netflix – although only a small selection of what looks like Netflix Original content actually supports it. While their processing can be applied to most audio sources to add the ‘spatial’ effect, direct integration is still the better experience and even then if your head or ears are the wrong size and shape you might not hear any benefit or it might make your experience even worse.

Personally, I can’t see myself leaping for surround sound headphones. Speakers on the other hand, when done properly, can bounce sound off of your walls to give you a much better all-encompassing effect, so that I’d be more interested in. What about you? Have you tried virtual surround headphones? If so do you like them? Do you hear a difference? Let me know in the comments below!