People who say VSS is a gimmick are people who listen to it for two seconds and hear how utterly different it is to what their ears are accustomed to. It's the same reason I will never believe in short demos of headphone impressions. Ears are like our eyes. They take time to adjust to your surroundings. You can't see in the dark when you first walk into a dark room, right? Then wait a bit and you can see a bit better. Same with ears. You wake up, and your hearing is super sensitive where you can hear a pindrop from a hundred feet away, but then later on, you'd have to be in the same room. Your ears have compensated.
People wonder why I'm positive on all types of headphone sounds. That's because I spend time with them and let my ears adapt to their specific sound. If I went from listening to the Ananda for days then go to the LCD-GX. I would not like the sound of the GX. And vice versa. You have to spend DAYS to saturate your ears with that kind of presentation that is a heavy contrast from the other.
I can't talk about all VSS as I only have experience with one: Turtle Beach DSS and I use the Philips SHP9500. I believe that in some games it sounds better than others, but in all games the stereo sounds better and more clear.
How can something that only gives you left and right audio cues and merges between the two be better than something that gives you a 360 degree amount of audio information? With stereo there is some guesswork on where sounds are coming from. With VSS, you can literally close your eyes and know that something is behind you at 5 o' clock for example. Stereo doesn't have that,. It can't for example, differentiate something that is at 2 o' clock from something that is at 5 o' clock. So then you have to rely on visual cue to know. So no, I will never ever accept that stereo is better than VSS. AT raw audio fidelity, yes. But I'll take a hit to sound quality if it lets me know exactly which directions sounds are coming from as opposed to guesswork.
I guarantee if someone were to set up a test between myself listening to VSS and someone listening to plainb stereo with both having blindfold on, and being asked which direction sounds are coming from, I would be the first to point the direction everytime.
But there are two speakers on a headphone in either ways, stereo or VSS, so I can't agree with you on this argument. I can clearly hear directional sounds in stereo because there are more ways to make you hear surround sounds other than what is called VSS.
I think the guy in this video explain it quite well: