Hey there guys,
Searching for the perfect sound i've recently acquired a Sennheiser HD598 headset. Until now i've been using a true 5.1 roccat kave headset, great for gaming but reeeeeally bad for music, so when i plugged in the HD598 it felt like a huge upgrade. I quickly discovered that the positionnal audio in games wasn't that great however and since then i've been trying to get it right.
As many of you know, there is no dolby headphone in the phoebus' drivers, it was replaced by dolby home theater which is supposed to be the same stuff, except you can't place virtual speakers by yourself. There is also the asus' home brewn xear surround headphone, but it's all cave-y sounding and it degrades the audio too much (but it's kind of doing its job). In the last place, we have dts ultra pc II, i couldn't get anything conclusive from this thing. The surround seems to work, but there's no notion of distance.
Now, the stuff i've discovered.
Dolby home theater works quite nicely once you know the trick to it (and yes it downmixes surround to stereo). Basically, you have to set your speakers to 5.1 or 7.1, enable dolby home theater, set the virtual surround to 1/3 or 1/2 (forget the audio leveler and dialog engancement as those kill the desired effect) and next is the tricky part.
There are three kind of games when it comes to audio, the ones that check the speaker's control panel and set the output accordingly, the ones that check your active audio out on launch (which means stere headphones in our case) and the ones that let you chose your output.
The first group tends to output surround audio to headphones because it detects the speaker configuration, the second outputs in stereo, because headphones, the trick is to launch the game and THEN plug the headphones in (but some games hate that) and there's nothing to do for the third group but to set the correct audio setup ingame.
I had the time to test some games (my steam library is quite large and i don't have the bandwidth nor the time to test all), here are my results.
What works fine:
Borderlands 2
Deus Ex Human revolution
Skyrim
Dishonored
What doesn't like the "plug it later" trick (no sound):
Borderlands 2
Skyrim
What needs the trick:
Battlefield 3 (set the game to Home Cinema, seriously, it worked better than i expected)
Max Payne 3 (rear surround settings, but even with real surround the audiomix is weird)
Mass Effect 2,3
Dragon Age (both of them)
(it seems a lot of EA games have the same behaviour)
What let's you chose the right setup:
Splinter Cell Conviction/Blacklist
Diablo 3
Starcraft 2
Try some more games by yourselves and share your results, i think we can make something with this card after all.
PS: I'd like to mention that i use Win7 with the latest (old...) drivers for the phoebus.