Best surround settings (Xonar Phoebus)

GoldenSW

Honorable
Jan 17, 2014
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10,510
I just got my Sennheiser PC 363D 7.1 gaming headset, which comes with an 7.1 usb soundcard. If I connect the headset through it, I get the option to set 7.1 both in windows and the driver from the sennheiser website, so the games know they have to output 7.1 channels, and afterwards being virtualized by the software. However, if I plug it into my Xonar Phoebus sound card, I don't get the option to set 7.1, because it is recognized as headset, so the games in which you can't select how many channels to output manually (ex. bf 4, the surround is great) will use whatever setting you have in windows -> stereo. My guess is the stereo sound is virtualized into 7.1 by the xonar software (I use dolby, not xonar surround). Clearly, I'd like to connect the headset to the xonar sound card, because of the sound quality, but do I get the same positional audio as if I used the usb sound card?
 
Solution


Not sure what you mean, surround headphones are NOT REAL. Regardless of what companies claim, you have two ears and therefor need only two independent sound sources to be able to replicate "position" in audio. Most games pre-mix the sound sources (in game) into a certain number of output channels based on where they expect the speakers to be. If it has a "headphone" mode, it's already better than N.1 audio in most cases.


For most games, just setting it to "headphone" mode internally will automatically apply the same type of transfer functions as virtual 7.1 audio options do. BF4 in fact lets you chose multiple binaural mixing options which will likely be better than virtual 7.1, but many other games also do similar things in the headphone mode.

 


Not sure what you mean, surround headphones are NOT REAL. Regardless of what companies claim, you have two ears and therefor need only two independent sound sources to be able to replicate "position" in audio. Most games pre-mix the sound sources (in game) into a certain number of output channels based on where they expect the speakers to be. If it has a "headphone" mode, it's already better than N.1 audio in most cases.
 
Solution