What is a "3D audio"?
It sounds like this will be similar to the way some other sound card manufacturers have created "3d audio" in that you won't need something like a 7.1 system to be able to better portray where exactly a sound is coming from. Stereo headphones will be able to give you a more immersive feeling by having audio be more directional instead of a general area (i.e. left speaker or right speaker).
And if 3d audio is so great, why doesn't everyone just use stereo speakers (maybe with a subwoofer)?
I'm sure some people do use stereo speakers, but headphones are almost a given for professional gaming since it shuts out environmental noise to hear quiet noises in game. Paired with 3d audio it would probably just give better situational awareness. As to how well it will work, I can't answer that.
Speakers are much less fussy and a lot nicer in a theater setup, but without feeding directly into your ears you need to actually surround yourself with audio sources (possibly bouncing some with a sound bar).
Stereo headphones all the way. You only have two ears; they can only ascertain direction based on a) the amplitude and phase differences between the sound reaching each ear and b) the frequency and time-domain filtering effects of your outer ear. These effects can be very accurately emulated using a physical head model or digital signal processing. Properly recorded and mixed binaural audio will provide the most convincing spatial effect, because your eardrums can't tell the difference between a binaural recording and actually being in an acoustic environment.
>And if 3d audio is so great, why doesn't everyone just use stereo speakers (maybe with a subwoofer)?
Your living room isn't an anechoic chamber, so you're hearing both the sound of your speakers and the reverberation of your room. You can tell that you're listening to two sound sources positioned in front of you, because that room reverberation provides substantial spatial information about your actual acoustic environment and degrades the spatial information of the recording. You can mount speakers really close to your ears, so you only hear the sound of each speaker with one ear without the colouring effect of your listening environment; we call such an arrangement "headphones".
I've done both, and (for me) it's the opposite. You're probably right for "accuracy of sound", but when gaming having a bunch of powerful speakers making sound effects gives a better "experience". :)
eg You can feel decent sized speakers with your whole body, which you're missing when using just headphones
Headphones provide a worse spatial experience than stereo speakers where the source material has been mixed for speakers; the equation becomes significantly different with flexible spatial formats like Dolby Atmos.
>You can feel decent sized speakers with your whole body
Using headphones with a subwoofer is a workable (albeit highly antisocial) option. You can't feel frequencies above about 150Hz, which is comfortably within the bandwidth of most headphones. You can also fit a low-frequency transducer to your chair, which will provide a similar feel to a powerful subwoofer without annoying the neighbours.
Speakers are undoubtedly more convenient and more practical for shared listening, but headphones provide a simply unmatched price-to-performance ratio; to get the best out of a pair of speakers, you need to spend at least as much on acoustic treatment to control the resonance of your listening environment.
Agreed. I'm back to using headphones myself at the moment (moved location recently, not yet set up properly), but I'm really missing my proper sound system setup. ;)
They can, primarily because ear shape varies, and you're going to hear the sounds from different positions based on the differences between the modeled and actual ear shapes. The infamous barber shop recording fails (for me) because it isn't clear what's in front of the user, and what is behind the user.
A great example of why ear shape matters is that ears can tell the location of objects in a vertical space based on the shape of the ear.
That said, I mostly agree with you in terms of the sound quality, especially in terms of price.
Headphones are much better than cheapo speaker setups, but a good 7.1 (or even 5.1) system gives a better experience.
I'd probably put it down to being able to feel the noise with your whole body :) with good speakers, rather than the ears-only noise from headphones.
Headphones simply can't mirror that effect, and you can tell this by simply turning your head while wearing them. If the soundscape doesn't change, it's not going to be accurate in terms of position.
Specifically, it's likely about the inclusion and use of TrueAudio[2], its current encarnation (TrueAudio Next) or a successor of that.
On my own experience with Sennheiser HD600 headphones, these effects can sound real to the point of tricking my mind.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording
In games, you usually have mono sound emitters placed in a 3d world and dynamically mix the sound channels but its still mono sound sources. You hear the same sound in all the speakers but only at different volumes.
3D audio most likely refers to newer audio systems that work with binaural of other multi channel sound sources that account for source and listener position and forward direction. These are getting popular because of VR. Its much easier to mix an ambient soundscape as 3D audio and drop it into a game than to place many emitters.
You can also get some binaural effect now with current sound pipelines (VR games do it) but my guess is in this gen its most likely done with code in the CPU instead of hardware acceleration.