 What? Where the crap are they? Ah, here we go. Okay, this should be fine. So I'm gonna go through this door backwards. Wait, shoot. He's behind me, but where? Come on. I mean, like I can tell he's like behind me, but I can't tell exactly where he is. This sucks. Oh, what's this? Surround sound in a headset. Heck yeah. I can get into that. Hold on a minute. You still only got two speakers. I mean, is it even any good? Like surely you'd need, oh. So this is full, true 7.1 surround sound in a headset. Look at all this. There's so many drivers in here. What is the best way to get surround sound out of a headset? There's only one way to find out by comparing them all. Surround sound is nothing new. I mean, we've had quadraphonic records since the seventies. And I mean, it's nothing special, right? Just add more speakers and boom, the sound is all around you. Easy. Ha ha, except not really. Unless the audio was recorded binaurally with dual microphones positioned like human ears, there's special processing required in the studio to convert the mono audio that's typically recorded in sound booths and movie sets or in YouTube videos into stereo or surround. And traditionally this conversion has been a highly manual and artistic process that locks down the number of audio channels that are available. But current gen surround sound technologies like Dolby Atmos and DTS X get around this channel hard lock limitation by actually processing where a sound should be in 3D space at the studio allowing your receiver to take this information and then approximate that location as best it can using whatever speakers it has available. This technology is called object-based surround. And I'm bringing it up because it just so happens to be very similar to how many games have processed their audio for years. So what nearly all of our surround sound headsets are doing is taking our game audio or at minimum a surround audio stream with this positional data and using what's called head related transfer function or HRTF for short to process it in such a way as to mimic the way that your ears perceive the directionality of sound, which is super complicated by the way and has to do with like the curvatures of the growths on the side of your head and like all that kind of stuff. That's not the only way to do it though. That's right. This here is the brute force method. So this headset has five drivers per ear to actually provide the front, rear, side, center and subwoofer channels that you'd expect in a straight surround sound system firing directly into your ear balls. Now the question here is, which one of these solutions is better? HRTF based surround makes a lot of sense. That is as long as your head is roughly the same size as the head that it was coded for. And meanwhile, true 7.1 methods like Razer's Tiamat 7.1 are potentially agnostic to the shape of your head, but all those extra speakers limit the maximum size of the individual drivers and they add weight and complexity to our setup. Besides, we don't know yet if either of these methods actually work. So without further ado then, it's time for some science. In order to test these headsets, we're going to use Overwatch thanks to its excellent surround mix. The setup is simple. Load up the shooting range, then grab Soltra 76 and sprint over next to these bots that shoot periodically. Once here, we'll blindfold our participant, spin the viewport around, choose a headset at random, and then have the test subject point out where they think the shooting is coming from. Once that's done, we'll have them take the mouse and blindly aim at the bots. Since we only care about the horizontal accuracy, I'll adjust the vertical axis so we can measure how far away they are from hitting the bots. Rinse and repeat, then it's on to the next victim. So after tallying the results, it seemed relatively random whether or not most of the participants picked the right direction when it came time set to actually aim. But there are at least a few takeaways here, starting with that Dolby Atmos for headphones, which is a software solution, ended up with more direct hits than any other combination while the Razer Man O'War came in second. Also, the clear loser here is the Razer Tiamat 7.1, where more often than not, the target was actually completely off screen. Maybe there is really nothing to the true 7.1 thing after all. Now, when it comes to pointing out the source of a sound, though, the best results came from the Logitech G933 and the ASUS ROG Strix Fusion 700 with an average variation of only 6% across all of our tests, which is less than half of the overall average. Our control stereo headset sat at just under 12% with every other contender, except for Dolby Atmos for headphones, ending up being actually worse. Poor Razer. Interestingly, even with our admittedly small sample size, it quickly became clear that the people who were more accustomed to headphone gaming tended to be the best at zeroing in on where they thought a sound was coming from, which makes sense given the sweeping pattern they employ. While ironically enough, everybody else seemed to have better results when pointing out the initial direction, perhaps as a result of the gamers being very accustomed to their own setups. It's hard to say for certain. For now though, let's get back to the question at hand. Are surround gaming headphones BS? According to our testing, the answer is mostly. With the exception of ASUS' proprietary solution, the most successful things we tried were all either Dolby or DTS based. So done in software, which tells me that there really is no such thing as a good surround gaming headset. I mean, ASUS' comes with ROG motherboards and you can even buy Dolby Atmos for headphones on the Windows Store with a DTS option coming soon. And those can be applied to any stereo headphones, which means that the real answer is something that many of you probably already knew. If you want the best gaming audio, then you just get good audio. There's no such thing as gaming headphones, just good headphones paired with the processing solution that works best for you. And the good news about that is that these software solutions actually tend to have free trials or in Razer's case are even actually free outright. So then with audio being such a subjective experience, it's on you guys to try it out with your own headphones and your own ears and find your sweet spot. So thanks for watching guys. If you disliked this video, you can hit that button. But if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description. Also down there is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum, which you should totally join.