One of the challenges when it comes to switching gaming setups from the Windows world to Linux, is fully-featured hardware support.
The Xbox Wireless Headset + official dongle does a decent job with a lot of bang for the buck. However, It’s not (yet) supported by XONE or any other driver. I can connect it via bluetooth, but then it just sounds dull - no surprise!
That’s why I’m now looking for a new headset which is approved by the community. It must offer decent (surround-)sound in games.
Maybe “Spatial audio” fits my description better than “surround sound”. I wasn’t quite sure whether additional processing is mandatory for realistic ingame sound. Back in the day (long long ago), EAX 4.0 was a huge improvement above direct sound. I guess that has changed, luckily!
Long story short: What I’m looking for is an immersive sound simulation for ingame environments, and I don’t like to lack behind proprietary solutions.
A really good stereo pair is ideal, something that gets the audio into your ear as clean as possible. I like closed because it’s easier to hear the quiet sounds as well as the loud ones, I’m often the first to pick up an approaching squad in apex with my friends.
In modern games all the advanced spatial processing is done by the game engine.
That was always going to be the best way to do it, as the game engine can account for not just the position in space of a sound source, but the geometry around it.
“Surround” only makes sense when dealing with a physical set of speakers. While with a stereo headset feeding audio into each ear, modern games are able to positionally process and place audio at any point around you.
Virtual 7.1 surround is just a worse way to do the same thing, and often in a way that ruins the audio quality. Not to mention it’s a standard for 7 discrete points of audio, not truly 360 degree spatial placement. But it can be done for cheap in software, no matter how crappy the hardware, so gaming peripheral manufacturers keep slapping it on as a marketing gimmick.
TLDR: Good clean stereo is worth way more than support for some BS “processing”, modern games already process audio positionally and turn that into the appropriate stereo signal for your two ears.