[juni0r]

Quote:

Originally Posted by BradH Haha, well I guess that came out wrong. I certainly appreciate detail in music, and I wouldn't be here otherwise. But, if someone put a gun to my head and said "You have a choice: either permanently give up headphones for gaming, or permanently give up headphones for music. Take your pick." I'd have to give up the headphones for music. The reason is that I can enjoy listening to music on a high end speaker system as much as on a high end headphone rig. But I don't feel the nearly the same way with respect to speakers vs headphones for gaming. I would feel as if I was making a huge sacrifice. I expect most people on this site would probably choose the opposite without even a moment of hesitation.

One important thing about detail in gaming is the use of specific sound cues. There are certain things that the top gamers listen for whenever they play. Different surfaces in games give off different sounds, and certain items, such as a mega health in Quake, give off a distinct sound that is different than anything else on the map. When such things are triggered, the top players will instantly recognize it and can pinpoint the exact location of their opponent, and often times the player will focus on the sound and listen to see which direction their opponent runs off in after picking up the item. The ability to hear these clearly (which is especially difficult when you are very far away from the item on the map and the sound cue is quiet) is so important to competitive gameplay which explains BradH's desire for detail in gaming. With most of our budgets, we couldn't afford to purchase a listening room and a good enough 5.1 or 7.1 setup, not to mention the privacy that would let us turn the volume up loud enough to hear every detail. However, with nearly every headphone setup, we could pull this off. Just some further backup for BradH's claim

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[Sycraft]

Quote:

Originally Posted by candyman963 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.

OpenAL and EAX are not competitors, they are different things. OpenAL is a method for addressing soundcards, an API. It is akin to OpenGL for graphics cards, hence the name. Also, like OpenGL, it can be extended and EAX can be one of those extensions. In fact, to use the latest EAX effects you need to use OpenAL.

You'll notice as much in Quake 4. To get access to it's EAX HD support, you have to switch it from it's default mode (which is MME output I think) to OpenAL. It will then allow the use of EAX, if your card supports it.

EAX overall does not mandidate the use of OpenAL, but neither is it something one uses instead of OpenAL.

 

[BradH]

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

Oops sorry - missed this question earlier.

I can't answer for all the different types of games out there, but for FPS style games I would say definitely not. The reason is that the EAX "environmental effects" provide no competitive advantage. Think of it this way: EAX is the audio equivalent of turning on all the "eye candy" graphics options in your video settings. It's fun and it looks cool, but it won't make you play any better.

In fact it does the opposite, and competitors always crank down every video option to the bare minimum to improve performance and visibility. As a side note of interest, this is usually the cause of some debate for tournaments.

The competitors want to turn off everything unnecessary. But the organizers and sponsors want the games to be played with the graphics cranked up and the eye candy enabled. After all, it's Intel/AMD/ATI/Nvidia sponsoring these events. And who would buy the latest CPU or video card if the best players in the world use Atari 2600 graphics? (It also annoys the game developers, who put huge amounts of effort into the artwork and such, only to have it all intentionally disabled in front of spectators.)

Anyhow as Sycraft correctly pointed out, OpenAL and EAX are indepedent technologies. As for OpenAL, it's a toss up - sometimes it's better, sometimes it isn't. For Quake 4 specifically, OpenAL is a huge advantage since the positional audio with OpenAL disabled is terrible. You'll literally have no idea where a sound is coming from. But for many other games, people complain that OpenAL makes everything sound "weird" and play with it off.

 

[Sycraft]

Quote:

Originally Posted by BradH Oops sorry - missed this question earlier. I can't answer for all the different types of games out there, but for FPS style games I would say definitely not. The reason is that the EAX "environmental effects" provide no competitive advantage. Think of it this way: EAX is the audio equivalent of turning on all the "eye candy" graphics options in your video settings. It's fun and it looks cool, but it won't make you play any better.

That's not necessiarly so. There are advantages, at least in some games, to being able to more accurately locate something than by direction. For example to hear if something is occluded by a wall. Games with properly implemented EAX can do that. So a sound that's behind a wall isn't just quieter, it sounds, well like it was comming through a wall. It's not major or anything, but it can help.

 

[BradH]

That makes sense. It's just been my experience the additional sound effects distract from the things I'm really interested in hearing. (Example: firing a rocket launcher in a large hallway causes 'environmental' reverb/echo effects and makes it harder to distinguish the other sounds occuring at the same time - such as enemy movement or item pickups.) This is probably more of an issue for some games, and less of an issue for others. I imagine there are some cases where each is preferable.

As usual, the best method is to try it yourself and decide what you prefer

 

[TooNice]

Quote:

Originally Posted by BradH I can't answer for all the different types of games out there, but for FPS style games I would say definitely not. The reason is that the EAX "environmental effects" provide no competitive advantage. Think of it this way: EAX is the audio equivalent of turning on all the "eye candy" graphics options in your video settings. It's fun and it looks cool, but it won't make you play any better. In fact it does the opposite, and competitors always crank down every video option to the bare minimum to improve performance and visibility. As a side note of interest, this is usually the cause of some debate for tournaments. [...]

Actually, I was (that's if I didn't) going to use this as an argument regarding the benefit of headphones providing more details than speakers.

 

[markot86]

Quote:

Originally Posted by PeeeMeS This isn't really agreeing to disagree. There's nothing subjective about speakers vs headphones when it comes to games. This is straight "you're wrong." Speakers are superior to headphones when it comes to soundstage and picking out where things are in games. I'm an engineer. This is a technical issue relating to current sound processing technologies and the inherient advantages/disadvantages of speakers and headphones. It's not even an argument. .

PeeMes, I'm sorry, but you have absolutely no right to talk; have you even heard the x-fi 3D headphone positioning capabilities, or are you just pulling this out of nowhere? Sure, a 5.1 system is better in positioning with a non-xfi card, but if you tried battlefield 2 through headphones on an x-fi, you would be singing a different tune.

I've tried to emulate the soundstage and correctness of imaging with my 5.1 set up and quite frankly, no matter HOW i set it up, my DT880's trump it in every single way. How about you actually listen to the 3D emulation the x-fi produces before you knock it?

 

[Seirrah]

I've got a Audigy 2 ZS and I have been using Zalman 5.1 headphones. I'm upgrading to ATH-A900 headphones and I'm wondering how much of an improvement the x-fi series really is, especially in terms of it's 3d emulation.

 

[5ergo]

wow zalman 5.1 headphones. are they any good?

im buying headphones for games and im thinking between those and sennheiser 280pro.

 

[Sycraft]

Quote:

Originally Posted by 5ergo wow zalman 5.1 headphones. are they any good? im buying headphones for games and im thinking between those and sennheiser 280pro.

For games, they are better than you'd expect form headphones. Their sound isn't really balanced, but you can hear it in surround. For music they blow, no two ways about it, they are really bad.

 

[Catska]

Hi everyone,

I figured I'd chime in here on the headphones vs speakers debate for competitive gaming since I have some experience in the area.

I'm going to have to agree with BradH, the fact is the vast majority of competitive gamers use headphones as opposed to speakers. It has become the standard. Out of all the gamers I have met over the internet, at lan parties, and at professional tournaments, I'd have to say only 1-2% of them use speaker setups in thier home. And most of this small amount was people that, while knowledgable of the competitive scene, still mainly played casually (pubbed).

There are many reasons for using headphones over speakers if you play competitively and most were stated already in this thread. For one, a good high quality 5.1 setup like most are talking about here is a hassle to buy and set up when you can just plug in a good set of headphones. Secondly, audio in games is not as advanced as music. While you can definatly tell the difference between a setup with onboard audio and $5 headphones compared to an X-Fi and Sennheiser HD600s, the actual game audio quality does not matter to people who have played said game for a long period of time. Most don't really care if they can hear the individual water drops splashing around while someone runs through a puddle, they mainly care that they can hear that period.

Postioning is a very important factor for choosing headphones over speakers. While some might argue that a 5.1 speaker setup will give better positioning than headphones, the fact of the matter is most actual competitive gamers disagree and show it by thier usage of headphones religiously. While its true that alot of the competitive scene has thier practice culminate in a LAN enviroment where speakers would be banned (for noise/convienance purposes), this doesn't mean people only use headphones online also because of this. The ratio of people going to lan tournaments to people playing in online leagues and tournaments is around 1/1000 or maybe more. Not only are people still competitive online but they still end up playing for money sometimes over the internet. In these situations you still will not see people using speaker setups over headphones.

Then of course there is the overall convienance factor for headphones in a competitive enviroment. They are of course easy to travel with and take anywhere to play, be it a friends house or the CPL finals. Then you have the fact that the sound is always consistant compared to speakers sounding different when you set them up in different areas, or if you have someone else making noise in the house that could be muffling a bit of your left side speakers etc. Consistancy is key, and headphones will replicate the same sound every time. Then as someone else mentioned, the majority of competitive gamers use microphones for voice communication (online and at LAN), and speakers interfere with this greatly. You can get a taste of this by joining a few pugs (pick-up games) and seeing the few gamers with speakers get bitched out until they connect a headset/headphones.

A good speaker setup will always have its advantages for the casual gamer like sounding more realistic and getting the immersion factor up (especially in war games), but for competitive gamers the choice is clear with headphones and there really isn't much that can be said to argue against that. The competitive gamer scene is one that spends alot of money and time (much like the audiophile scene) trying to improve every aspect of thier world. From buying $40-50 mousepads to trying out every new mouse on the market just to get that extra 1ms edge that can be all the difference in an online arena. So while your average casual gamer will be having a blast playing on a public server hearing battlefield 2 planes flying overhead on his 5.1 speaker setup, I'm sure that a professional playing Quake 3 for thousands of dollars in a high-tension tournament enviroment will prefer his chosen headphones.

And to the poster that asked about EAX, the answer is no. Like BradH said earlier, competitive gamers turn off all unneccasary factors of games including some areas of graphics and sound. EAX does nothing to improve the positioning in most games that would require such a thing, and mainly is there to make the sound feel more 'epic' to people who would want it. Pretty much every feature like EAX has been disregarded by competitive gamers as nothing more than a typical FPS hog designed for casual gamers. The truth is the default sound engines on most games like Quake (1/2/3) and Counter-Strike work well with audio positioning, and they don't need any additional hardware support to make it any better for comp. players. Theres also the factor of tournament machines usually using onboard audio anyway, so it would be a bad idea to get used to sound card-specific audio enviroments.

The only time this has changed though is very recently with the release of Quake 4. Since Creative blackmailed id Software to have to add in OpenAL and EAX into id Software games, the default sound is practically useless for positioning in multiplayer. Because of this, OpenAL is needed by anyone wishing to compete at a high level because you won't be hearing any accurate gamesounds from the default sound system. As seen with Doom 3, the default doom 3 engine sound system is fine with positioning and actually sounds great, but Raven managed to screw it up bigtime for Quake 4 multiplayer and make any competitive player have to put up the bucks for a Creative card just so they can compete.

This is the only time any competitive gamer has ever needed something like OpenAL.

 

[5ergo]

Yeah well there are 2 tipes of players; players that are obsessed with being the best and players that enjoy the game and dont care about the score as much.

First tipe will go for any headphones while second tipe will prefer 5.1 setup

Headphones have many advantages in audio terms such as playing loud at night, you cant do it with 5.1 setup. And also, headphones need no room acustics which is more important than it seems in first place.

But if you want to be blown away and if you want to be right there, than even a good (i mean no multimedia) 2.1 setup will beat headphones.

Im looking forward to get some headphones but if there will be a chance i'll sure turn my audio gear on and shake some walls

 

[Seirrah]

Quote:

Originally Posted by 5ergo wow zalman 5.1 headphones. are they any good? im buying headphones for games and im thinking between those and sennheiser 280pro.

They do the job well. It might not sound 'rea' but I can certainly tell, roughly, where a sound is coming. There are three drivers on each ear to give the effect of front, middle and back ....the trade off is of course that these are small and not the best quality. Therefore the headphones are great for games (well, games where positioning is important) but not so good for everything else. I'm not saying they are bad, just I know that a lot of phones would sound a hell of a lot better, especially regarding bass.

I've ordered some ATH-A900s which I will hopefully use for gaming, and will provide me with better sound, but (probably) less positioning. The X-Fi series is meant to emulate 3-D sound well, better than the Audigy 2 card I have now,, but by how much ? This is what I really would like to find out.

 

[cloot]

sorry for bumping an old thread but I thought it's better than to start a new one in this case. (if not, moderator please just split this as a new thread)

my question is,
is a creative X-Fi card (XtremeGamer/Music) enough to drive Sennheiser HD 555 headphones properly, or is an amplifier necessary?

Can I use Creative Inspire 2.1 speakers' integrated amp and plug the Sennheiser phones into them, or is it going to cause sound quality loss and/or X-Fi's 3D sound processing effect loss?

Or perhaps if I don't want to give extra money for the amp, I should stick with the lower-impedance Sennheiser 485?

I'd appreciate any feedback, thanks.

 

[Kaluminati]

it's enough.