What’s the Difference for Gaming?
Spatial audio and surround sound are often used interchangeably whether in gaming or movie discussions. It doesn’t help that many gaming headsets, earbuds, and software suites advertise both at the same time. As a result, a lot of players assume they’re the same thing but they’re not.
Both aim to solve the same problem: helping audio be more immersive, so you can understand where sounds are coming from within the game’s world. The difference is how they accomplish that goal.
What Is Surround Sound?
Traditional surround sound creates a sense of direction through physical speaker placement. Lots of them, actually.
A typical 5.1 or 7.1 surround setup places multiple speakers around the listener, with each speaker responsible for a specific audio channel. If a sound is meant to come from behind you, the rear speakers handle it. If it’s to your left, the left speakers take over, and so on.
When set up properly, surround sound can create a convincing sense of space because sound is literally coming from different points around you.
The downside is that it depends heavily on your room’s own acoustic properties. Speaker placement, room acoustics matter, and even where and how you sit all matter. Move out of the ideal listening position and the illusion starts to weaken.
And obviously lots of big speakers are usually more expensive than one pair of good headphones. So, this is where spatial audio comes in.
What Is Spatial Audio?
Instead of relying on multiple speakers, it uses software and psychoacoustic techniques to simulate a three-dimensional sound field. The most common method involves HRTFs, or Head-Related Transfer Functions, which model how sound naturally reaches your ears from different directions.
Rather than physically placing speakers around you, spatial audio tricks your brain into perceiving direction through subtle differences in timing, volume, and frequency; all determined by an algorithm.
This allows headphones and earbuds with only two drivers to create what are essentially 3D sounds that come from above, below, behind, beside you, and everywhere in between.
The result can be surprisingly realistic despite using just headphones. That is, assuming you’re using good headphones that are capable of precisely producing the subtle differences in timing, volume, and frequency …all determined by the algorithm, and all of that.
Why Gaming Likes Spatial Audio Better
Years ago, surround sound systems were often considered the gold standard for immersive gaming audio. But today, things are very different.
Many players game on PCs, consoles, gaming handhelds, and especially smartphones. Many gamers use headphones or earbuds for better audio, thus, surround sound speaker systems have become less common simply because they’re less practical and portable. And again, much more expensive!
Modern game engines often automatically render sound in three-dimensional space first and then rely on the game engine’s spatial processing to translate those cues through to your stereo headphones or earbuds.
In many ways, gaming audio has become headphone-first.
Which Is More Accurate?
A perfectly calibrated surround sound system can be incredibly convincing. The problem is that most people don’t have dedicated rooms to build systems like this. In addition, a friend or family member walking around in the living room can drastically change the acoustics and throw off the directionality of the game’s audio cues.
Personal audio devices like headphones avoid many of those issues because they deliver sound directly to your ears, completely isolated from your environment. So, there’s really nothing to mess with your ability to receive that critical game information. Adding in the passive noise cancellation of ear tips and headset pads and you’re locked in, essentially.
This consistency, as well as portability, is one of the big reasons why spatial audio has become so popular in gaming. While the very best surround systems can outperform it, most players will get more reliable results from a strong spatial audio implementation and a good pair of earbuds.
Why Earbuds Are The Best for Spatial Audio
Now when it comes to earbuds vs the big over-ear headsets, earbuds actually hold the bigger advantage.
Because they sit directly in or near the ear canal, they provide a consistent level of audio separation and inject that sweet, sweet, audio right into your ears so there’s a lot less sound bleeding out compared to over-ear headsets.
This actually allows spatial audio to be as pure and complete as possible coming out of your earbuds’ drivers. And because ear tips provide a superior solution to blocking out the environmental noise in your room or environment, with the right ear tips fit you’ll basically hear just the game audio and nothing else!
Of course, the hardware still matters and you can’t just get any earbud you can get your hands on and call it a day. If you want to be able to detect and locate sound cues accurately, spatial audio has to work perfectly, and not a lot of budget drivers can do that.
Weaker drivers give weak imaging. So in extreme cases, things coming from the left can show up on your right, while distance can be completely off, making things from far away feel closer than they do. Adding to that the audio separation might not be as clean, so when the firefights start popping things distort and you can get disorientated, and lose track of where the other players are. And a good tuning is just as important as any software feature; you don’t want earbuds or IEMs that just boost the mids because that’s where the footsteps are – that’s not how any of this works!
One big misconception in 3D audio is that more channels automatically mean better positional audio cues. But like we’ve established above, this is only true when you’re using room speakers. But in more practical cases than not, you can achieve more with spatial audio via earbuds and headsets. After all, don’t you want to go all in when you’re locking in?
To Summarize…
The difference between surround sound and spatial audio is that surround sound uses speakers, and spatial audio uses headphones – that’s it!
They’re different approaches to the same challenge: to help you understand the game world better through immersive 3D audio. Except one relies on physical speakers, and the other relies on psychoacoustic processing that translates it into your stereo earbuds.
For gaming, spatial audio with earbuds and headphones is generally the more practical solution because you wear it and it works perfectly every time. Plus one pair of headphones is much cheaper than a surround sound system and the necessary room redesign.
But don’t sleep on speakers and surround sound systems either. If you can get there eventually, they’re super clutch when all you wanna do is put on a game and chill, but don’t lose out on the directional audio cues.
Now if you did want to have some good spatial audio and don’t know where to start, here’s our latest list of recommendations of best earbuds and IEMs for gaming.
