Hardware Asus Strix 7.1 Review

Just a heads-up for those looking for headphones for VR use: do NOT get 'surround' headphones. HRTF (Head Related Transfer Function) processing relies on having one driver per ear. A 'surround' headset with a bunch of tiny drivers will at best just sound bad (due to using a bunch of cheap tiny drivers rather than one larger high quality driver), or at worst sound completely wrong (due to poor driver positioning and/or the headphone hardware of software messing with the HRTF output).

 

Wow, they really beat the **** out of those with the ugly stick.

 

I would argue that the buyer should experience the headset for themselves.

I have the Razer Tiamat 7.1 and the Asus D2X 7.1 soundcard to make it work properly. It took me a long agonising week of trying many setups and soundcards, and other headsets, before being happy. All the bells and whistles of the soundcard are turned off, and the simplest settings used, which are 8 channel PCM 192kHz 24bit, 7.1 speakers setup, and using the Virtual Speaker Shifter to separate the side and rear speakers (otherwise its almost impossible to hear the difference between 5.1 and 7.1 speakers).

Of course the loudness and sound quality will not compare to my stereo sennheiser 595 or 210 headsets, but then my sennheiser headsets cannot produce real 7.1 surround sound.

(Added) oh, I just noticed that you mention VR. In that case the 7.1 headsets are at the mercy of the games being played. I would be interested to know which games you've played on VR that would not work correctly with real 7.1 headsets.

 

i have the same headset with the xonar phoebus 7.1. had the same experience. HORRIFIC setup made even worse by sifting through faulty phoebus drivers, but the end result is a great sound in game and surround sound videos(the 2.1 leaves a bit to be desired, but hey, you have to have a shortcoming somewhere)

i can't imagine the VR games would have any issue so long as it treats the headphones as a surround system(which as far as i've known they all do) because otherwise they will probably throw virtual surround adjustments into the audio which will clash with the headset and just be a cluster f$#^ of terrible.

oh wait.... if the game tries to track your head and thinks the speakers are stationary, if you're turned to the left it would decide that you should hear anything to your right from the front.... i take back my comment, the games will have to recognize it as a headset instead of a surround system like they do now or it will be really really bad when it comes to directional sound. i'm sure there is a setting that would knock out that adjustment though, wouldnt be too hard to do.

 

It looks nice though I'm fine in my beat.

 

All that would be needed is to turn off the VR modified sound and revert back to how we hear sound normally when using a monitor. I think.

 

As I mentioned, the issue with 'surround' headsets relates to HRTF (Head Related Transfer Function) processing. This often gets mixed up with 'environmental audio', being a similar concept. HRTFs model the reflection and absorption of sound from your head and body (and for some implementations, the outer ears or 'pinnae'). This makes for VERY good localisation of sound from around you, dramatically better than the discrete point sources of multi-channel surround*.

Head-tracked sound is a necessity for VR, 'turning it off' will result in sound coming from the wrong 'location' as you move your head. Likewise, turning off HRTF processing and trying to bodge on a moving multi-channel sound rig to the tracked head location will kinda-sorta work, but be a massively inferior experience to a pair of actual stereo headphones + HRTF.

Multi-channel headphones in general are a dirty hack to get around that Creative killed A3D and tanked EAX, preventing at least semi-decent environmental audio for headphones gaining widespread traction. This means the only implementation of localised audio in most games being multi-channel, hence multi-channel headphones. With VR, and the requirements of tracking head movement anyway, there's no reason not to push for proper localised audio again, and this is indeed happening (e.g. Oculus licensing Realspace, and Valve using an unnamed implementation).



*Incidentally, Dolby Atmos uses similar processing to take spatially positioned audio sources and reprocess them for an arbitrary number of speakers in arbitrary locations. It does not encode discrete channels like 5.1/7.1/22.2 surround. This applies to the cinema distribution of Atmos, not the home distribution (which is a fixed channel downmix of the original spatial source).

 

Just an FYI i don't think Creative had a choice, Microsoft killed it off from Vista onwards by moving the driver model from kernel level to user level for stability reasons (supposedly), although it could also be argued that they wanted to kill hardware accelerated sound in favor of the Universal Audio Architecture and XAudio2 that happened to be used by their games console.

 

A3D died with Aureal in Creative's patent trolling. Creative's patents weren't applcable, Aureal won in court, but the legal fees were enough to cripple them and Creative bought them up and stopped support for A3D. EAX was not as effective an environmental audio API, and never got the update A3D had. This all happened nearly a decade before Vista was released.