A Word About Audio

[Agrajag]

My background is in game development and I've been a gamer in squads and clans going way back.

On the audio side I've been involved from the very first days of PC audio. I currently work for a very high-end earphone company (Etymotic Research) and head up their new gaming division called EDGE Acoustics (www.edgeacoustics.com). ER makes $300 earphones for people like U2, Coldplay, Dire Straits and many other pros. We're aiming to do the same for pro gamers (and non-pros who want to be the best they can be).

GRAW 2 has exceptional 3D sound. The spatial cues are better than in many other games with very small subtleties present to hear the opponent.

When you think about audio know a few things:

1) Most headphones/earphones were NOT designed for FPS gaming. They were designed for music. Music audio is not the same thing as game audio. Music headphone companies design their products to "enhance" the experience. That means what you're getting is an artificial sound. In games that means that the spatial cues that were presented by the developer are also artificially processed, and thus, changed.

2) This "enhancement" usually means HEAVY bass boost. Bass boost is a MAJOR enemy of FPS gamers. If you're a good player with bass-boosted headphones, you'd be significantly better without bass-boosted headphones. Bass boost muddies spatial cues heavily. Each company colors the product to fit the needs of the perceived market. Color some highs, boost the bass X or Y amount, etc. All of this is bad for gaming but might be just fine for music. It's why some people prefer Sony over Sennheiser or any other comparisons. The different coloring goes a long way towards why these products are so different.

3) Isolation is a key factor. The more isolation you can get the more clearly you can hear. If you cup your hands over your ears you get a muffled sound as every outside resonance bounces around the cup. If you stick your fingers in your ears that goes away. You hear your heartbeat. That's isolation. GOOD earphones give you maximum isolation. For example, the BEST headphones on the planet give you 22dB of isolation. ER earphones provide 37-42dB of isolation and that's log scale so that's not double but 10x the isolation of headphones. Most headphones give you only 2-10dB of isolation. This is all about focus. The more you can focus, the better. Anyone that tells you that you can block out all sounds is lying. You have a bone structure so your body will convey outside sound. The key is to reduce it as much as possible.

4) Accuracy/Detail is king. Most products made for music are not accurate. This can be easily measured and most products on the market have accuracy scores well below 50%. The products I've used measure in the 80's and 90's.These are designed for a medium that isn't concerned about accuracy. They're sold to gamers because that's the predominant available technology. It's like using a butter knife as a screwdriver. It can work but it's not optimal.

Just so you know, ER is a research company. They don't do marketing. They don't do commercials. I've been with them nearly 3 years and have yet to sell anything (the gaming earphones launch next month). I spent all this time on a research study testing pro gamers response times with all sorts of audio equipment.

The results were pretty obvious. The BETTER (fidelity) the equipment, the better your results. Speakers did the worst. Surround speakers did SLIGHTLY better (they sound great and fun but they're totally inaccurate). Earphones (ER, Shure, Ultimate Ears and soon, EDGE Acoustics) give you a 30-50% performance improvement over headphones. It's mainly due to isolation but also, in the case of ER & EDGE, flat response. We're not bass boosting so you hear what you're supposed to hear without it being "enhanced."

I'm telling you all this not to sell you earphones. I'm telling you this so that you'll think about the facts the next time you replace your heaphones. Our products aren't even available yet.

I wrote the Official Sound Blaster Book. I helped get AdLib and Creative Labs started in the sound industry. I have literally dozens of headphones in my collection all sent free to me by the manufacturers. I used to use $1,200 studio-level Sennheisers when I gamed. When they wore out I tried earphones and never looked back.

Be wary of marketing hype. I posted this specific note because I saw a recommendation of a pair of headphones that are almost entirely hype. For example, any product listed as using active noise-canceling is suspect for a gamer. These processes remove elements of sound in an attempt to reduce outside noise. What are they removing? In a game you can't afford to lose localization data! Also, the result of this, as I said, gets you to about 20dB of isolation at best. You can do much better without all the "technology". Another one is surround sound headphones. This one is pure marketing. If you feel you hear surround with it, great. What you're hearing is an effect very much like turning on any processed effect in your stereo like "Hall" or "Arena". Your ears are STEREO. Surround sound works only because of distance. To place multiple drivers in your headphone and think your stereo ears are going to pick up on this is just not realistic. The same result can be had from any good, clean, accurate stereo headphone.

You also get what you pay for. I wonder with people who spend $400 on a video card, $100+ on a sound card, $90 on a mouse, $80 on a keyboard, etc., and then spend $30-$50 on a headset. EDGE earphones aren't cheap but neither are any of the headphones out there that are truly accurate. What you see debated most of the time are people arguing about the differences between low-end solutions. I also encounter the term, "best I've ever used" which, on the face of it, means nothing. How many have they used? I will get into debates with kids who have owned two or three pairs of crappy headphones telling me that their $30 surround-sound headphones are the best on the planet. Uh-huh. I cannot begin to tell you how many poor audio reviews I encounter. Most of them are clearly written by people who have only a cursory exposure to equipment. The best they can do is share a use-case review. They liked or disliked them "because" but to recommend them over other equipment types or levels they've never experienced is where I start to get annoyed.

Be informed. Go look up what went on with the DVD debate of DTS audio versus Dolby Digital. Fans of each camp fought heavily over each one being better but in the end, the majority of consumers who did blind testing preferred the sound of DTS. Recent studies have analyzed this and found that the ONLY difference between DTS and DD is that DTS provides the same audio slightly louder than DD and most consumers equate "louder" as "better". The same thing happens with video all the time. TV's in stores have their color settings set way over the top as people look at one set over the next and if the colors "pop" they perceive this as "quality". It rarely means that but that's how people think. People in audio equate booming bass and volume as quality and that's what companies then cater to.

If you have questions, don't hesitate to drop me a note asking about it.

Edited November 14, 2007 by Agrajag

[Nutlink]

Well, what would be your recommendations for high quality gamer headsets?

[Colin]

Well, what would be your recommendations for high quality gamer headsets?

Yer me too same question. Vista or XP.

[Agrajag]

Well, what would be your recommendations for high quality gamer headsets?

I think I answered that. I used Etymotic earphones for several years over every other headphone and headset I encountered and then joined the company to help create gaming earphones for them when a job offer from them came my way. Obviously I'd recommend the products we're now getting ready to release. Look at the comments on our website. These are from tournament players and top industry people. John Miles wrote the most popular sound API in the business. It's used in over 4200 games. He's one of the top 3 people responsible for sound in PC's today and in getting it started back in the 80's. Then there's Jamey Scott's comments. He's the head sound guy for Epic Games and responsible for sound in Gears of War among others. All of us can use any audio product on the market and have tried just about all of them.

You can find them on Amazon here:

http://www.amazon.com/E-D-G-E-Acoustics-GX...2028&sr=1-2

Or you can go to our website at http://www.edgeacoustics.com for more info.

If you don't want to go that way, the best gaming HEADPHONES I've encountered are the Sennheiser HD497's though you'll need a clip-on mic. Headsets I've tested haven't impressed me much. The more expensive ones have way too much bass. Cheaper would be better there as they tend not to be overdone. Logitech's are okay. Sennheiser PC160's aren't bad either.

Well, what would be your recommendations for high quality gamer headsets?

Yer me too same question. Vista or XP.

The OS should make no difference to the solution here. Do yourself a favor and don't bother with USB-based solutions. These almost always use the absolute cheapest sound chip solution to provide audio. Think about it. If you pay $50 for a USB headset just how much do you think they spent on the sound chip that must be included with them???

Edited November 16, 2007 by Agrajag

[Parabellum]

Eh. Looks like a long-winded solicitation post to me.

[Agrajag]

Eh. Looks like a long-winded solicitation post to me.

First, I'm not in sales. Second, to each his own. There was no way for me to post this and not have some people think what you did. The facts are what they are regardless. How about being helpful in your comment by pointing to elements of the post that you're doubtful of specifically?

Edited November 23, 2007 by Agrajag

[ROCO*AFZ*]

I think , 1st this product needs reviewed before i would even consider them, and 2nd... it needs a band to hold them on your head. Earbuds fall out. this apparently was overlooked ....

Also... I think i tested them at our DandH show with our company... or something similar. The sound was great for music, and there was no outside noise... but they also gave me a headache.

[NoQuarter]

Lots of good information in the OPs' first post, common sense stuff that I either overlooked or never thought of, relative to gaming.

Time to check my Game Mode audio settings.

Thanks Agrajag.

[Agrajag]

I think , 1st this product needs reviewed before i would even consider them, and 2nd... it needs a band to hold them on your head. Earbuds fall out. this apparently was overlooked ....

Roco, Etymotic's earphones don't fall out. These are not earbuds. I've used my Etymotic ER-4P's for more than 8 years. Not once have they fallen out. I've been using a pre-production gaming headset for months now and it hasn't fallen out. We're talking hours of play each session. As far as reviews those will come soon after the product is officially out. Stay tuned.

Also... I think i tested them at our DandH show with our company... or something similar. The sound was great for music, and there was no outside noise... but they also gave me a headache.

You were at D&H? I was at D&H each time.

As far as giving you a headache, we don't get that complaint. You can go search comments from users on Google yourself. Not sure what the issue there was but I highly doubt it's something that would continue. Perhaps the volume was a bit for you. So did you and I talk? Which show was it? There were two this year and I just returned from one a few weeks ago versus say 6 months ago.

Edited November 23, 2007 by Agrajag

[Agrajag]

Lots of good information in the OPs' first post, common sense stuff that I either overlooked or never thought of, relative to gaming.

Time to check my Game Mode audio settings.

Thanks Agrajag.

No problem. Be aware that many people are using wrong settings for their games. It's common. Just yesterday, one of our guys, Migs, found out that he'd been setup for surround sound and could never understand why he wasn't hearing the things we "claimed" to be hearing. He thought we were just pulling his chain. He finally changed the settings and, presto, suddenly he's hearing all the samples. One in particular sounds a bit like a very faint "change in the pocket" sound that keys me off to someone nearby but not moving much. He heard this, among others, and now his game is improving heavily.