Quote:
Originally Posted by MikoLayer
Now that you brought up the topic of "competitive gaming", do most competitive gamers use EAX and swear by it? just curious
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Yep, since it's pretty much the only useful system available. OpenAL has been making some progress, but not enough to make me miss EAX whenever I have to play without it.
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As a semi-competitive gamer (i.e. I play on ladders and have been around the scene for several years but don't LAN for a variety of reasons), my personal experience has consistently shown it easier to pinpoint sounds using headphones. While a proper speaker setup would provide better positioning, I think gamers don't tend to use them due to space, cost, and quality considerations.
First, space: Think about the positioning of most people's speakers relative to their computers. Most non-multimedia/non-studio monitor speakers image very poorly at the distances most players sit from them (generally 2-3 feet in front of center channel, 60 degree angle to their fronts which are 5 or so feet away, etc.). Having actually played like this for a while on a friend's rig, I found it much more difficult to get an accurate feel for where things were coming from. In order to put yourself the proper distance away from the speakers you'd have to set it up with distances in the home theater range (except with the computer monitor right in front of your face). This is not at all practical for most gamers, myself included.
Second, cost: Duh. Getting a speaker system of equivalent quality to a nice headphone system is much, much more expensive.
Finally, quality: Fact of the matter is most surround speaker systems marketed for computer use have wretched sound quality and imaging. They're honestly just not worth using. The soundstage is smeared all over the place, whereas a set of headphones for the same price will have very good positioning. Yes, even the "high-end" systems like the Klipsch Ultras.
Also, to those who say that having speakers at a LAN would give away your position to your opponent, stop being silly. Not only is your opponent going to be wearing headphones (
), but the distance from your seating position to theirs is going to dominate the individual distances/orientations from their speakers to their position, which is where much of their positional information comes from.
That, and it would be very difficult to ascertain someone else's position in the level relative to yours given only their ambient sound effects and the noises you hear the characters making through their speakers. Specifically, I'm thinking of games such as Unreal Tournament 2004 where entering certain parts of the level makes distinguishable noises (i.e. planks on the map DM-Rankin make a creaking sound when stepped upon). When you make this sound, both you and your opponent hear it. It would be much easier for your opponent to find your position based on the sound heard through his headphones rather than the sound heard from your speakers.
I've never had a problem distinguishing between 1 o' clock- and 5 o' clock-centered sounds using headphones. I think it's mostly due to the fact that if you don't see someone in front of you but you hear the sound, you can safely assume that it's behind you.
![]|[ GorE](https://cdn.head-fi.org/avatars/m/10/10421.jpg?1376682382){kind=avatar}
