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Does dolby headphone sound as bad as cmss-3d? I don't mean to sound like a troll but if you're concerned with audio quality to the point of spending several hundred dollars on headphones then why would you use an audio processing technique that butchers sound quality as much as cmss-3d does. To top it off don't most games do a pretty good job with positional cues in stereo mode?
They sound similar to me (tested with JVC/Victor SU-DH1 fed via X-Fi Titanium HD with Dolby Digital Live turned on) in games with software audio engines, though in games that use DirectSound3D or OpenAL, it's not even close. Virtual 7.1 can't match a full 3D binaural sound space.
Stereo mode in games only provides left-to-right panning to my ears. There's no good sense of front or rear, let alone high and low. Needless to say, I don't like that at all. However, some people are willing to play in pure stereo just because they can't take the sound quality hit, and that's fine. Everyone can game their own way without forcing their tastes on everyone else; it's all just suggestion.
Unfortunately, I haven't found a binaural surround filter that provides the positional advantages without muffling the sound so much, but I can live with CMSS-3D Headphone for now. Whatever the case, Creative needs more competition, but their biggest competitors (Aureal and Sensaura) got bought out (which is likely why Creative even has CMSS-3D Headphone in the first place), and now PC gaming audio has taken a turn for the worse as developers worked around Creative in a way I never expected, that being software-driven audio with all the attention on 7.1 and no binaural mixing options given for us headphone users.
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It's been discussed to death throughout this thread and even before this thread's existence that Dolby Headphone is greatly superior to both CMSS-3D and stereo.
Nobody says you have to take our word for it, but there wouldn't be much merit or credibility to this thread, nor hundreds of people who can vouch for it here.
Then why is my experience the exact opposite of that? Dolby Headphone provides less sense of distance and no sense of height whatsoever in DirectSound3D and OpenAL titles, because it's only presenting virtual 7.1 instead of the full binaural 3D sound those games can offer, and which CMSS-3D Headphone willingly taps into. I can't think of any other explanation. If DH treated every sound source in those games as an individual speaker located anywhere in 3D space, maybe things would be different and possibly in DH's favor.
In games that downmix all the sound to 7.1 anyway (thank Microsoft's new, inferior XAudio2 + X3DAudio API for that, along with newer versions of FMOD enforcing software mixing), I can't tell enough of a difference to vote one way or the other, though these games already sound worse than those that use DirectSound3D or OpenAL in terms of positioning anyway.
If you ask me, the reason why Dolby Headphone is the technology of choice here is simple: Mad Lust Envy is a console-only gamer. CMSS-3D Headphone is used on PC sound cards for PC games, not for products geared toward consoles. By contrast, several DAC/DSP devices are floating around that offer Dolby Headphone for console gamers. Which one do you think he'll use?
Anyway, this thread is at least useful for finding out which headphones work well with either technology. If it works well with DH, it works well with CMSS-3D too.
