[RPGWiZaRD]

Yea well many people don't believe in the windows speaker config (in the control panel) makes a difference, at least for many games I play it's a matter of positional cues VS none whatsoever. Some games may also have broken stereo implementation such as Skyrim xD Holy **** what a difference between 2.0 and 5.1 speaker config! With 2.0 you don't get any positional cues and the volume is also very low. With 5.1 the volume of everything is much higher and there's a "360 degree" positional sound even without DH or CMSS3D or anything.

 

[voodoo do-er]

Normal Stereo for the most part.

 

[dalingrin]

Quote:

Yea well many people don't believe in the windows speaker config (in the control panel) makes a difference, at least for many games I play it's a matter of positional cues VS none whatsoever. Some games may also have broken stereo implementation such as Skyrim xD Holy **** what a difference between 2.0 and 5.1 speaker config! With 2.0 you don't get any positional cues and the volume is also very low. With 5.1 the volume of everything is much higher and there's a "360 degree" positional sound even without DH or CMSS3D or anything.

 
Well, it certainly depends on the game. Some use their own settings but most games that are using Windows 7 apis will use the system reported channels. I am not sure of the order of the audio pipeline in most audio drivers so I don't know how setting Windows to 2 channels would affect the audio if the application sets the number of channels internally.

 

[kazaakas]

I've been using CMSS-3D HP for years and I recently replaced my old X-Fi XtremeMusic with a new X-Fi Titanium HD and still using it.
 
The biggest reason for me to use it over dolby is that I play a few multiplayer OpenAL/DS3D first person shooter games (Tribes Ascend (UT3/OpenAL) and a few source games such as TF2).
As far as I know, CMSS-3D uses the ALchemy/OpenAL library to generate sounds with raw position data, while dolby headphone simply mixes it down from an already generated 5.1/7.1 stream from the game (which CMSS-3D does too, for games without OpenAL/DS3D)
Which makes CMSS-3D vastly superior with those kind of games, giving me even moar of an unfair advantage
 
Besides in this video I find CMSS-3D to sound better also, while the game used doesn't even support these libraries, so both algorithms are downmixing 5.1/7.1
 
Of course I suppose this stuff is really really personal as the used HRTF's have to accord with the shape of your head and auricles

 

[voodoo do-er]

been using dts lately

 

[BababooeyHTJ]

I'm bumping this to prove a point on OCN to be honest. 

 

[RamGuy]

I've been using Creative Titanium HD for some time now, utilising CMSS-3D (haven't fiddled around with THX TruStudio) and find CMSS-3D vastly superior compared to Dolby Headphones.

I went through a Asus Xonar HDAV1.3 Deluxe and a Asus Xonar Essence STX before I finally settled with the Creative Titanium HD. The one thing I "hate" with the Titanium HD is the lack of headphone amplifier which makes it somewhat lacklustre in-pair with my Sennheiser HD 650. I went with the Titanium HD only because of the CMSS-3D feature.

To me the Dolby Headphone feature provided a echo feeling to the audio rendering it utterly useless in my opinion. It wasn't that noticeable during all kind of games, but during YouTube videos I always had to manually disable it otherwise the audio was horrendously bad. This is not the case with CMSS-3D at all, it's very precise in all games I play and the audio during YouTube videos and what not sounds more than decent. It's not like the Dolby Headphone feature sounded horrible in all games, but games like Battlefield 3 for instance had much better positioning using CMSS-3D compared to Dolby Headphones and the fact that I can just leave CMSS-3D without feeling the need to disable it every time I do other things than playing gaming is a massive plus.


Now I'm in the market to expand upon my configuration, I want some kind of amplifying to improve upon my Sennheiser HD 650 performance, but at the same time I don't want to be forced into some kind of surround virtualization that sounding like I'm within a dark cave in a long forgotten mountain.

I'm wondering if the Creative Recon3D ZxR might do the trick due to it's integrated headphone amplifier, but I'm sceptical because of the lack of CMSS-3D as it only provides THX TruStudioPro and nothing else. Another solution might be to get an external DAC / Amplifier and run on-board DPS using optical to the external DAC if that won't cause some latency issues.

 

[k1DBLITZ]

Quote:

This is a very interesting discussion. So let me ask this question... with games moving towards software-acceleration, what exactly is left for the sound cards to do anymore, if we ignore the DACs in them? For example, why not just get a Asus DG and a good external DAC and Amp, and let the software processing handle the rest?

 
I see this argument a lot, even in this post several people have made reference to it, so I'm not picking on your personally.
 
I have to say when I see this statement I laugh....and then I cry a little on the inside because I remember what 3D sounds USED to sound like in the mid to late 90's. Event though software sound has come a long way, it still doesn't compare to what we used to have, not IMO. For example, everyone can agree that Battlefield Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3 have amazing sound...yet even with their great sounding sound engine... it lacks occlussion. Meaning that when you're running around in one of those houses with 2 floors or more, the guys on the second floor sound like they are in the same room with you. 
 
With that being said... Why does no one argue that we don't need video cards? After all.... the graphics can be fully rendered in software.... The answer is because there is a benefit to using dedicated hardware to render video, not only a performance benefit, but also a visual benefit.. .same thing applies to audio...performance benefit and increased audio quality and positioning.