Thanks for the reply, Studio. I've been reading several articles that have sounded promising from Valve and Oculus about supporting HRTF or 3D audio for VR. They sound pretty serious about it. So I was thinking that Unreal4, which has been pretty popular for VR would allow positional audio in most of the games built on it. Also, I'm a huge BF fan and with BF1 coming out in Oct. I was hoping to get some positional audio support in it, like BF2/3 had.
Yes, VR may finally see a resurgence in good gaming audio.
There's been a void the past decade or so ever since Vista killed DirectSound3D Hardware support.
Battlefield One is sure to support Dolby Atmos, just as
Star Wars Battlefront does.
However I have no idea how that is currently implemented in the game as it's not something that I play.
I don't know if you need an Atmos-capable receiver, or if it can be processed by the game.
Overwatch (not something that I play either) also supports Atmos for headphones on PC, and that's processed entirely by the game so it's just an option that you can enable in the menus.
But I don't think that games including good headphone audio is enough to replace a sound card.
There are still many, many games out there which have bad headphone support, but do have 5.1/7.1 capabilities, which a sound card can then create a good headphone-optimized binaural mix from.
Since the sound blaster has a built in headphone amp? It sounds like the cheapest way to drive the DT770's. From this article the review showed a pretty good sound stage considering they are closed headphones.
The E5/G5 seem like great devices if you want an external USB sound card (DAC) with a headphone amp built in.
The main differentiators between them seem to be that the G5 supports 4-pole headsets, while the E5 has a battery and Bluetooth support.
If they update the E5 to support 4-pole headsets, or release a higher-end G model, I will probably upgrade to one of them from my Sound Blaster Z, as that would be very convenient for my setup.
They seem to like to make it as confusing as possible to select the right product. I tried doing a comparison, but some support Virtual Surround, which I think is not what I want? And only the Newer Zx supports EAX 5.0, but then it uses the SoundCore3D DAC? I thought that was the one on the Recon3D that someone said to avoid...
The Sound Core3D chip is an audio processor, not a DAC.
It's the chip they use to handle things like the virtual surround processing.
Prior to that it was the 20K1/20K2 chips in the X-Fi cards, and now the Axx1 chips in the latest devices.
The last chips to have EAX processing were the 20K1/20K2.
EAX is "supported" on the newer Sound Core3D devices - and almost certainly with the Axx1 devices too even if they don't mention it - but it is now software emulation running on your CPU.
The software emulation gives you back EAX effects in old games, but they don't sound the same as running on real hardware. (20K1/20K2)
All the effects sound really exaggerated in the software emulation, there's no subtlety any more. I'll try and record some clips to make a comparison video.
But all of this only applies if you are playing old games. EAX is not supported in any game past ~2008 or so.
Then the G5 doesn't have the SBX studio which is what I thought I wanted for the Headphone surround function, but it has BlasterX software instead? I'm guessing this is for console support. Someone else was recommending the Omni, but it doesn't look like it has a headphone amp on it.
It looks like it's just a rebranding of SBX. They even have an SBX button on the side of the device.
It has all the same settings as SBX Pro Studio.
I guess my wording was not clear. What I meant was that the sound virtualization is 100% software and could be implemented independently of the sound card in use, but Creative, in their incompetence, chose not to.
I would gladly pay for the software.
"Product isn't what I want it to be, therefore incompetence."
I agree that it would be good if they offered a product which lets you do the SBX processing on your CPU and output that stereo signal to a device of your choosing, but that's not what X-Fi MB3 is.
X-Fi MB3 is designed to work with specific on-board audio codecs. I don't know the reason for that.
Perhaps there is some audio processing hardware that they are able to leverage to take some load off the CPU? Perhaps it's a licensing deal? Perhaps they want you to buy their own hardware if you're choosing to buy an external audio device rather than a software package to work with hardware built into the majority of PCs.
As I said, I don't know the specifics. But I doubt that it's
incompetence.
