Stop Buying Surround-Sound Headphones

Gamers are the most common victim of this scam. Over the past few years, a number of tech startups introduced headphones with true virtual surround sound capabilities. Unfortunately, the audiophile community isn’t having any of it, citing the lack of established headphone manufactures producing their own surround-sound models.

What audiophiles already know is a quality pair of headphones will provide good sound staging for positional audio, regardless of the source. The snake oil business is currently divided into the true and virtual camps. True surround sound headphones utilize multiple drivers within the earpiece, similar to a home theater setup. Unfortunately, that means the quality of each driver goes down; would you rather spend $200 on two speakers or $200 on 10?

Virtual surround sound, on the other hand, has some advantages going for it. It’s impossible for a speaker array to really reproduce a theater system when the drivers are so close to the ear. Virtual surround sound headphones digitally alter the signal to give the impression of location and distance through psychoacoustics. In fact, most VR and game developers already do this through binaural audio, a technique of recording surround sound into a regular stereo track.

So the question is, do you want stereo headphones or surround sound headphones? My advice would be to splurge on stereo headphones that can do high-quality sound staging. Positioning won’t be quite as precise as the virtual system, so if you insist on the latter, your best bet is to outsource the virtual processing to a sound card like one with Dolby Headphone or Razer Surround Pro.