And Why More Processing Isn’t Always Better
A lot of people think spatial audio is a piece of software, or a setting. Maybe a kind of surround sound but for gaming.
But the reality is that most games, going as far back to the early 2000s, already have some form of spatial audio. Since games already build a 3D environment around you, it stands to reason that games should also be creating the audio in 3D as well, right.
At its core, spatial audio is just about placing sound in space. Not just left and right as in stereo, but in front, behind, above, below, and either near or far. It’s this system that lets you hear footsteps coming from behind a wall or tell whether someone is reloading or performing an action like defusing a bomb in Counter-Strike. But what makes all of this possible is how games render audio internally.
Almost All Games Have Good Spatial Audio Already
Every sound in a game exists first as a vanilla recording of a sound effect such as a tap, gunshot, or thud; or a looping ambience like a fireplace, the woods at night, or a city street. That sound is placed (i.e. assigned coordinates) somewhere in a virtual 3D environment such as the game’s map. The engine then tracks where it’s coming from, how far away it is, and how it interacts with the world around it. From there, it translates that information into something that your human ears can use to interpret that virtual world.
HRTF: The Silent Guardian
This is where something called HRTF comes in, or Head-Related Transfer Function. We don’t need to get deep into the technical side of it in this post, but the idea is straightforward: it simulates how sound naturally reaches you inside the game, from different directions.
If the shape of your head and ears, as well as the architecture of the environment around you affect how you perceive direction in real life, HRTF tries to recreate that effect digitally. Using just two channels, left and right, it creates an audio treatment that gives you the illusion of a full 3D space – all in left-right stereo.
This is the most important part that most people gloss over: the game is already doing the heavy lifting when it comes to creating spatial audio.
And this isn’t new technology. Variations of spatial audio processing have existed for decades. As a matter of fact, if you boot older games such as Half-Life and earlier versions of Counter-Strike, you can see that with good headphones, the placement of audio cues in 3D space is quite on par, if not better, than what we have these days – and these are games from 1997 and 2000, respectively.
What’s changed are two things: how much modern games rely on spatial audio, and how much headphone companies market spatial audio post processing to upsell us on additional headphone features.
Change 1 – 3D Revolutionized Gaming More Than We Realize
As game environments became more complex and three-dimensional, sound stopped being background decoration like in 2D platformers, and instead became part of how players perceive the game world.
3D games require you to add sound as a means to perceive the world, on top of the graphics; and there are two reasons why. The first is that it’s what’s natural to us: evolutionarily speaking, we rely more on sound to “map” the world around us than our vision.
The second reason is more technical: field of view. Most 3D games are either in first or third person view which limits how much of the world you can see. In first person it’s typically 90° to 100° while third person is at 60° to 90°; in comparison our natural field of view is at around 200° to 220° so we already lose a lot of visual information of the world by looking through a narrow screen.
Sound allows us to not just compensate for that, but become more immersed in the game world. This makes spatial audio essential in modern gaming. However, given its demand and necessity, naturally this brings about a new set of problems, and coincidentally, the second thing that changed in spatial audio, or where did it all go “wrong” in gaming?
Change 2 – Solid Metal Drivers: Phantom Enhancements
Spatial audio usually fumbles when people try to “enhance” what’s already there.
There’s a common assumption that more processing equals better spatial audio. Virtual surround sound modes, 7.1 simulations, and aggressive EQ presets. These are all marketed as solutions, whether directly as products or indirectly as guides to solve a problem that doesn’t actually exist.
Instead of improving spatial accuracy, more often than not it blurs it and leaves you with more muddied and distorted audio than you had before. Extra processing can exaggerate certain sounds, shift positioning slightly, or smear the separation between audio cues. What was originally a clean, well-placed sound in the game engine can end up feeling less precise once it passes through multiple layers of enhancement.
If the game already has good spatial audio built in, adding more on top doesn’t always help. Sometimes it just distorts what was already working. This was exactly what happened to Valorant where the in-game spatial or surround sound protocols clash with the separate 3D audio protocol that’s turned on by default in Windows 11 computers.
The resulting sound sounds more mono than stereo (same sound on left and right headphone), and in some cases the directions are even reversed (sound from the player’s left side gets played on the right headphone, and vice versa). Unsurprisingly, the simplest fix for this glitch is to turn off either Valorant’s surround sound, or Windows’.
By reducing the amount of post processing, it immediately increased the accuracy and quality of the game’s spatial audio – which showed us that improving spatial audio was never a software problem in the first place. And this brings us to a simple truth that most people want to avoid.
Good, High Quality Hardware Matters A Lot More Than You Think
Good audio gear doesn’t create spatial audio. But it allows audio to be played in the highest fidelity it can. And the more accurately it does that, the easier it is for your brain to receive the information and interpret those spatial cues in the game around you.
Things like the headphone’s capabilities in accurate imaging and audio separation become important here. Imaging is what allows you to pinpoint where a sound is coming from, while separation keeps different sounds from blending together when things start to stack up. If your earbuds or headphones can’t maintain that clarity, spatial cues become harder to read no matter how good the game’s audio is.
This is also why overly boosted bass or uneven tuning can ruin your ability to detect enemies’ locations accurately. This isn’t to say that more bass automatically means bad headphones in gaming. But when you’re working with budget devices that have limited capabilities, you simply get what you pay for.
The bottomline is that the game already builds the 3D space accurately. Just like how getting high resolution clear monitors can help you see the game world clearly, high quality, high-fidelity headphones let you hear and take in the sound information a lot more accurately..
In most cases, spatial audio in games is already there. It just needs the right equipment to allow you to hear it.
Want our recommendations on the best gaming earbuds capable of spatial audio? Check out our list of top gaming earbuds here.
