BababooeyHTJ
100+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Oct 12, 2011
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I just want to make this a simple poll. What do you use?
Different people hear things differently, but to me CMSS-3D is better than Dolby Headphone and THX TruStudio.
THX TruStudio being the worst, it literally just sounds like that "bathroom" or "basement" EAX effect you see all the time, to me. Dolby Headphone is OK to me, but I don't like its positioning that much, it never felt very precise with the Essence STX. It's hard to explain, but the moment I tried a properly set up Creative Titanium HD with CMSS-3D the difference was noticeable straight away.
DH with the Essence STX to me felt like I was wearing headphones - it was definitely better than pure stereo audio, but discerning front sounds from rear sounds was difficult. Because of this, pretty much all sounds at 10:30, 1:30, 4:30 and 7:30 (I'm referring to positions on a clock, just in case anyone gets confused) were difficult to pin point as well.
Then I got a Titanium HD, and positional audio to me felt perfect. It didn't feel like I was listening to headphones when I was playing, it felt like all the sounds completely surrounded me, there were no "holes" where it was difficult to tell where anything was coming from.
So was the problem Dolby Headphone, is the Essence STX poor at imaging or am I just different than most other people in this thread? Who knows. Unfortunately, anyone who wants to know which method is better for gaming is just going to have to try it out for themselves.
Also, make sure you set up your games and Windows audio settings correctly when using CMSS-3D - you want to make sure Windows and the game you're playing are using 5.1 surround sound, then turn on CMSS-3D and it'll use all those channels for positional audio in your headphones.
With the Titanium HD I can actually listen to music with CMSS-3D on and it still sounds great. It doesn't make it sound any worse to my ears as the effect is fairly subtle with music; it just ends up being a different presentation of the music. Dolby Headphone I find OK with music too, definitely listenable but less subtle than CMSS-3D. For the most part, though, I prefer to stick to stereo for music, even with the Titanium HD. The only DSP that I felt made music (and games) sound terrible was THX TruStudio.
I honestly hadn't heard of too many people using 5.1 without some sort of software to down mix. I may have to give that a shot.
I should add that I finally played around with THX trustudio on my titanium HD and I wasn't too impressed. The hit in audio quality wasn't as bad as cmss3d most of the time but at certain times it was worse than cmss3d. Unlike CMSS3d audio didn't seem as distorted across the line but low frequencies were much worse. You could almost hear crackling in Serious Sam 3 when a werebull comes running at you and when there was a few of them you don't hear footsteps anymore since the low frequencies just seem to blend together. I noticed similar distortion in Skyrim with a dragon landing. The highs sounded off too, just not as bad. Mids sounded ok compared to cmss3d. The worst part was the actual positional audio, it left me completely unimpressed. It really wasn't any better than straight up stereo. IDK, maybe the recon3d does better like I've seen a couple of people claim but I sort of doubt it.
Sadly I don't have any free pci slots since I would love to pick up a cheap Xonar DS to play around with DH.
There's several threads in different forums especially regarding how to set up X-Fi cards for the best positional sound and the common agreed procedure is in windows control panel set speakers to 5.1 but select headphones in the X-Fi software (the X-Fi GUI's speaker config isn't connected to the windows one which is usually the case!) and then enable CMSS3D if you're gaming and just want the best possible positional sound.
Yeah, I know that but I've never heard of anyone using 5.1 without cmss3d or DH. Like I said I may have to try it out.
I've tried both a Titanium HD and ASUS D2 but I ended up selling both as I wasn't really satisfied with either DH or CMSS3D and stayed with Realtek HD onboard ALC889A chip because it's pretty darn good sounding to me despite being onboard and I just put the speaker config to 5.1 and I'm all set with good positional sound, your hear an immediate change when you swap between stereo and 5.1 speakers while listening to music for example. Then I also thought Titanium HD was more on the warm side with somewhat boosted bass vs recessed highend (talking very very tiny amounts here) while ASUS D2 sounded slightly on the bright, thin, analytical side and Realtek HD fits there in-between and actually sounded like having more neutral balance than either of those.