Hey everybody,
 
I am writing this because I am looking at buying headphones that are good for surround sound gaming. I have been looking at Mad Lust Envy's gaming headphone setup and I am pretty set on getting akg q701 headphones. The thing that I am more interested in now is how to use both my pc and my xbox without buying separate setups for both. They are right next to each other and I was wondering what the best way to get surround sound from both into my headphones would be.
 
I have seen some that use a sound card with optical in and then hook the xbox into that, but the sound cards that have optical in are limited so I was wondering if there was some other way to go as far as that is concerned. 
 
 
Thanks

I cannot say that this is the best way, but I have turtle beach x41s + the stand that comes with them (witch is basically just an external virtual surround sound card, + wireless receiver) for the turtle beaches and it works with both my xbox and pc... the headphones themselves are not very good (I didnt know this when I bought them in 2009). I have tried playing xbox just to see how good the surround sound audio is with my HE-500s, and on CoD Black Ops 1 using the surround sound card + fiio e6 + HE-500s, the amount of advantage I gained was dumb. I did not have xbox live at a time, so I used a free trial and on a new account and had a 3.5+ k/d/ within the span of a few hours of playing (that was my first time on cod in over 2 years). On pc, for games like DayZ, Arma 3, and BF3, the surround sound was also pretty good. Especially on DayZ. 
 
Despite this, I think something similar like the astro mixamp is a better purchase, it will probably do the same things better than what I have, and for cheaper; it is my understanding it can work as an external surround sound card for both pc and xbox... just make sure it works with new consoles.

Yeah I was thinking of getting the astro mixamp but I heard that if your motherboard doesn't support surround sound then it is just like stereo out and at that point the mix amp doesn't do much. Or at least that is what I heard. I don't think my motherboard has Dolby digital live which is why I am now looking at sound cards.

Well im not too sure on the specs of the mixamp, but for me I just do optical out from my motherboard (integrated soundcard, some reltek hd software => x41 surround sound card) and it works... my motherboard also has dolby surround sound thing but to get surround sound to work with mixamp/x41 i doubt you need it - I don't at least. On other note, I don't really like the dolby surround sound, it doesnt give me good positional audio if I have it on. Finally, try http://www.razerzone.com/surround . It is like dolby but works better for me and is free until end of this year. Only downside for me is it doesnt give good positional audio directly from rear, but try it yourself.

howcanthatbe said:

Yeah I was thinking of getting the Astro mix-amp but I heard that if your motherboard doesn't support surround sound then it is just like stereo out and at that point the mix amp doesn't do much. Or at least that is what I heard. I don't think my motherboard has Dolby digital live which is why I am now looking at sound cards.

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Asus Xonar DG (PCI) sound card, $25.99 and there is a $10 mail in rebate this months.
That will take card of your Win PC, the DG should do Dolby Headphone Surround Sound as well as the Mix-amp.
 
Get the Astro Mix-amp for the game console.