It’s Become So Polarizing We Need To Talk About It
If you ask a bunch of guys in your Discord what they think about spatial audio, you’ll likely hear two very different kinds of opinions.
Some will swear it’s one of the biggest upgrades you can ever make to your gaming experience – much more than a 4K curved 1KHz monitor and the best GPU out there.
And the other side will turn it off immediately, claiming that it makes things sound artificial, and it harder for you to tell where sound cues are coming from.
So who’s right?
Both actually. Things are never as simple as they are.
But before we get into that, let’s talk about what spatial audio even is.
Spatial Audio Isn’t Anything New
Despite how heavily it’s marketed today, spatial audio isn’t some brand-new invention, or the most astroturfed feature being marketed to gamers since RGB.
“Spatial audio”, as we know it today, has been around for decades in videogames. Technologies like Head-Related Transfer Functions (HRTFs), binaural audio, and early 3D audio systems have been used to replicate how sound should feel in-game, especially as it pertains to our perception of direction and distance.
The goal has always been the same: make sounds feel like they’re coming from specific locations around you instead of being there as decoration or simple sound effects.
And the reason is because we’ve fundamentally changed the way we play games right about the mid to late 90’s. That was when hardware tech from new PC graphics cards to consoles like the N64, PS1, and Dreamcast, all allowed us to make that big jump from 2D to 3D.
Sure, games could use this new hardware allocation for better sound to simply make our game experiences better – and they did! You could make games more immersive as in the case of games like the first Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil games, and even Goldeneye on the N64. Or, you could make sound actual information you could take in that lets you accurately understand the 3-dimensional world around you better, as what Thief (1999) sought out to do.
Today, most people game using headphones or earbuds rather than large surround sound systems because the latter is not only more expensive, but also less precise than having a good pair of headphones.. Modern game engines also create much richer three-dimensional soundscapes than they did years ago, with some games having the license to use Dolby Atmos, giving spatial audio far more information and definition to work with.
So technology-wise, what you see–er, rather hear–is what you get. At least as far as the game is concerned – all the information is already in there. Even in retro game ROMs ripped from the 1990s!
So where did some people’s problems with spatial audio come from?
The Problem Was Never Spatial Audio, But Bad Spatial Audio
If spatial audio has haters, it’s because they haven’t experienced it right.
Nobody complains about spatial audio or surround sound in movies because you get it 100%. And if you’ve only got a TV and not a good speaker system at home, you won’t complain about surround sound or spatial audio either, because you know you don’t have it.
The real problem is when headphones are marketed as having “spatial audio” but in reality they have mediocre drivers that can’t do the job. And worse, manufacturers force you to use post-processing software for the “spatial audio” to come through in the first place.
Poorly tuned headphones can make spatial audio sound overly processed, distant or too near (distance perception will not only be way off but you can’t tell for sure). And truth be told, at that point you’re better off getting some average normal earphones at Best Buy.
If all someone had was bad headphones that couldn’t bring out the real spatial audio experience, It’s easy to understand why someone would be a spatial audio hater in the first place: what they got was only a pale imitation of the real thing!
When done right, spatial audio just happens. As a matter of fact, you don’t even need post-processing or sound enhancements because that’s not what spatial audio even is in the first place. All the spatial information is already in your game, movie, show, or even music.
You simply need to have better hardware that can do the job. That’s the real secret of spatial audio.
Good Hardware Matters Even More
Every positional cue, timing difference, and directional effect only needs to be reproduced accurately by your headphones. If the hardware struggles with imaging or sound separation, no amount of software can completely fix that. And it’s as simple as the meme about “downloading more RAM”: no matter how many RAM you download from some sketchy site on the internet, if you open up your laptop or PC and it says 8GB, you’re only ever gonna have 8GB!
Think of it this way. Spatial audio is data within your media that’s responsible for building the map. Your earbuds are responsible for drawing it.
If the earbuds blur together nearby sounds or struggle to maintain clarity during busy scenes, then the accuracy of that spatial audio replication just doesn’t come through.
That’s why good gaming earbuds only need to prioritize fundamentals like imaging, separation, and having a great tuning before even thinking of touching post-processing in the first place.
Good hardware is what makes spatial audio possible.
So… Is Spatial Audio Just Hype?
The best kind of audio is often the ones you don’t even know that they’re there, until you don’t have it anymore.
When spatial audio is done well, it doesn’t feel like something layered on top of the game. It just feels like the real thing. Sounds behave like it should in the real world, whether it comes from around corners and from afar, with all the echoes and muffling that the world around you adds to that.
As a result, when you’re playing online multiplayer, locating enemies, tracking their movement, and hunting them down becomes much easier for you to seal the deal and win those matches.
And when you’re eating through a single player campaign, it’s just a whole new level of immersion that you didn’t know you were missing. That is, until you get to try those games again but with great spatial audio-capable earbuds..
So is spatial audio the real deal?
Provided you cover the foundations first, absolutely. Good clean game audio signals, thoughtful implementation (no overbuilding your setup), and headphones with drivers that can do the job all have to work together to create the one great experience for you. Take away any one of those pieces, and the experience starts to fall apart.
In the end, spatial audio isn’t software you download from somewhere and run, thinking it will boost your budget headphones’ performance. It’s something within your games and other media that good, high performing earbuds are able to bring out.
If you want recommendations on what some of these good, high performing earbuds that are perfect for gaming are, you can check out our list of best gaming earbuds here.
