Headsets

Gaming Headsets and Audio
by Graeme Clark

Following on from our popular gaming mouse article, we’re now setting out to address some frequently asked questions on gaming headsets. As always, we don’t believe that a plain old ‘review’ really helps you distinguish products so read on to learn our findings…

Appearance and fit

Manufacturer photos can only tell you so much about how a product looks, so we went a step further and took lots of new photos to show off our range of gaming headsets. But leaving them sitting on a nice backdrop just wouldn’t work, so meet ‘Jack’… our very own mannequin. His purpose is to give you a relative comparison for the size and fitting types of our headsets, so take some time to admire his poses. The cop shades are not necessarily a recommended gaming extra, but we felt it enhanced Jack’s otherwise plain expression. Any similarity to Abba’s music videos is purely coincidental.

Surround Sound in Headsets… does it make a difference in gaming?

Using ‘5.1’ headphones in gaming events has caused some recent stir, with rumours afoot of surround sound headsets being banned in competitions for any additional advantage they may give gamers. Naturally, if the feature is coded into the game, there’s no harm in using that facility to improve your performance and overall experience, so this ruling does not appear to be enforced on any public servers. We wanted to find out just how much of a difference it made, so armed with Battlefield 2, two sound cards and two headsets we performed a good old fashioned comparison.

nForce 4 On-Board Audio with Icemat Siberia Headset. Audio Detail set to High.

nVidia’s integrated audio solution is considered to be one of the best onboard sound options, particularly for gaming, so it seemed a suitable starting point. Battlefield 2 sounded reasonable with this combination – explosions and gunshots certainly had enough depth, but literally the extent of any position or spatial awareness was only that sounds got quieter or louder. The sound was just ‘always there’, and while this seemed to work fine it didn’t feel to be offering an enhanced gaming experience.

nForce 4 On-Board Audio with Medusa 5.1 Gaming Headset. Audio Detail set to High.

This made quite a difference. Although I wasn’t so keen on the extra weight of the Medusa headset, they definitely delivered a more powerful bass sound in explosions and enabling 5.1 in the audio control panel meant that some sounds were directed through the rear speakers. It certainly gave a better impression of when there was a vehicle approaching, although I felt that the sound was sometimes just from a specific ‘corner’.

Creative X-Fi with Medusa 5.1 Gaming Headset. Audio Detail set to Ultra High

The ‘Ultra High’ audio detail setting is only available with the X-Fi series cards, and when used with a 5.1 headset it certainly adds a whole new dimension of quality to Battlefield 2 – the difference is noticeable as soon as you enter the game, with voice commands clearly coming coming from the direction of the other soldiers. Walk into a path of gunfire (just for experimental purposes of course, it’s not recommended in normal gameplay) and bullets can be heard flying past you. The thing that really impressed me was the difference in the positioning of the audio – while with just using the onboard audio in the above test, sounds would fade from one direction as they increased in another position, the X-Fi setup felt more that you were surrounded in 360 degrees of audio – it added an incredible amount of extra depth and I felt so much more immersed in the game.

Creative X-Fi with Icemat Siberia Headset. CMMS-3D enabled, Audio Detail set to Ultra High

This was actually the test that interested me most – Creative promise surround sound effects using stereo headphones using their CMMS-3D feature. Certainly, it was a huge difference over the ‘onboard’ audio tested with the Icemat headphones earlier – the sound was a lot sharper, and certainly had an added depth. As I watched a helicopter fly overhead, the surround sound effect was there to some extent – there was a feeling that I could hear it flying past me. However, I don’t feel it added a competitive advantage – closing my eyes and just listening did not give an impression of where exactly audio was coming from. I could hear it was nearby, but compared to the test with the X-Fi and the Medusas I couldn’t make a clear decision on where the sound was originating.

Benchmarks

Do all these additional sound options affect performance? While the X-Fi card has a powerful sound processor on board, it would be interesting to learn the effect on game framerates from the above tests. I recorded a demo in Battlefield 2 incorporating some walking about, a bout of gun fire, walking underneath a flying helicopter and a few explosions, and played this back with each test setup to compare performance.

For reference, the system uses an AMD Opteron 148 2.0Ghz processor, Club3D ATI X800RX graphics card and 1Gb Corsair RAM – basically a relative spec for the ‘average’ gamer.

The results were interesting, showing that enabling 5.1 audio for the Medusa headsets caused quite a drop in the maximum frame rate. There’s a reasonable frame rate advantage in sticking with the more basic audio settings.

Testing Conclusions

Adding the X-Fi card made a huge difference to the enjoyment factor of the game – if you revel in being able to turn up graphic settings to maximum and seeing every detail, then you’re missing out if you’re not using a high-end sound card as well. The experience is absolutely transformed, and you really feel that you are in the thick of the action with the improved sound depth. For the point of view of any competitive advantage, the only setup where I could tell where things were coming from to any level of accuracy was the X-Fi and Medusa combination. In time, this could probably be learned to provide a slight playing advantage for the keen gamer, although having observed more experienced players I note that they rarely keep their back turned on any area for an extended time and can react to situations fairly quickly eg If there’s a sound of a shot and the opponent is not in front of them, they can turn and check the area quickly. Concentrating on the direction of the sound through the headphones would allow a quicker determination of where this came from, so when a split-second decision can make a difference between life or death, this could certainly be played to your advantage. I would expect only a certain portion of gamers would really be able to take full advantage of this though, as it does require an extra level of concentration on what you hear during gameplay.

What do other gamers think?

We love the Gumpcom LAN community – once more they were happy to be our guinea pigs for our review. This time we asked them to try out a few of the most popular high-end headsets, picking a favoured model for comfort and sound quality. For the sound quality test, we used a playlist of audio tracks from a variety of genres to allow listening to a ‘known’ music track across the five sets of headphones. The ‘comfort’ test was simply asking our participants to adjust and wear the headset for a moment and asking them to consider how they would feel about wearing it for several hours at a time.

Logitech’s Precision Gamer headset was not a popular choice with many users citing the plastic headband as being awkward and uncomfortable, and it was surprising that the SteelSound 5H and Everglide S500 headset did not win many friends as both headsets have been reviewed well elsewhere. The Icemat Siberia headset was our 2^nd place headset in this survey, with a total of 23 votes, with users appreciating the well balanced audio quality, light weight and comfortable padding. Our overall winner with 30 votes were the Medusa 5.1s, preferred again for having comfortable padding but the most power and strongest bass out of all the headsets tested here.

Thank you again to the participants at Gumpcom for their time in testing these products – we feel it’s so much more valuable to get a collective opinion on products over just a single person’s opinion !

Audio Quality with Creative X-Fi 

While the opportunity was there, I just had to try Creative’s 24-bit Crystalizer – this function attempts to enhance MP3s by resampling them at 24bit and then attempting to sharpen up any areas of the song that have been damaged during the compression to MP3 format. The results were certainly impressive – I’ve always found MP3s at 192kbps tend to sound a little bit flat, and at high volumes you can always hear a quality loss on some aspects of the song. I used ‘No One Knows’ by Queens of the Stone Age as one example, as the drumming on this song is excellent – and the crystalizer function made a noticeable difference to this track, really bringing out extra depth on the hi-hats and cymbals. I found myself trying out other songs with the crystalizer switched on and off, and in every song it helped bring a little more life out of the sound – a live acoustic guitar track was another notable point, there was an added richness and precision to the sound with the Crystalizer function.

Overall Conclusions

The main aim here was to make the headset and sound card selection process easier for our customers, but one thing I can certainly state is that anyone who listens to music regularly or enjoys finding extra detail in games should not hesitate in adding a Creative X-Fi to their system, especially with the lower cost OEM Xtreme Music model being available now. We’ve also found two headset choices which are most popular among gamers, and provided some background information on gamers to help them pick between the stereo Icemat headset or the Medusa 5.1.

Competition

Once more, we have a neat competition for you ! We're giving away a set of Medusa 5.1 Gaming headphones, to be in with a chance of winning just email competition@kustompcs.co.uk before noon on 14th September , telling us how many of the headsets in the LAN Gaming Shopheadset section support 5.1 Audio. What's more, we'll also provide a replica of Jack the Mannequin, signed by all of the Kustom team, for you to rest the headphones on when they're not in use. It's sure to be worth a fortune on ebay one day.

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