Don’t Just Use Music as Your Benchmark
When most people get a new pair of earbuds, the first thing they do is play their favorite song or load up their favorite YouTube video. It’s a familiar way to judge sound quality, and if you’re buying earbuds mainly for music, it makes perfect sense.
But if gaming is your primary use case, why not test them with the thing you’ll actually be using them for?
Games ask very different things from your audio gear than music does. Instead of playing a carefully mixed recording, modern games constantly render sounds along with the graphics in real time. Dialogue, footsteps, ambient effects, music, vehicles, and explosions are all generated and treated live so they all compete for your attention, often at the same time.
Different genres also stress different aspects of an earbud’s performance, which is why using a variety of games can tell you far more than listening to a handful of songs ever could.
Competitive Shooters: Test For Imaging and Separation
Competitive shooters like Counter-Strike 2 and VALORANT are excellent for evaluating imaging and instrument separation. Coincidentally enough, they get the most focus from headphone manufacturers because the need for accurate imaging in this genre is really that high.
During a busy firefight, dozens of sounds can happen simultaneously, from footsteps and gunfire to grenade explosions and teammate callouts. A good gaming earbud should keep those sounds organized instead of blending them together, making good sound separation one of the top priorities.
More importantly, it should make it easy to judge where sounds are coming from. It’s easy to boost mids and give you the illusion that you’re hearing footsteps better. But accurate imaging isn’t about making footsteps louder and instead placing them precisely within the game’s virtual space so you can react faster, better.
Open-World Games: Test For Immersion Levels
If competitive shooters focus on precision, open-world games focus on immersion and getting lost in the game.
Games like Cyberpunk 2077 or Red Dead Redemption 2 surround you with environmental details that make the game world feel alive to the point of forgetting the actual world around you. Wind rustles through trees, NPC conversations play out in the background, distant vehicles pass by, and music blends naturally with the environment in a cinematic way we all wish real life were like sometimes.
This is where balanced tuning becomes important. An earbud that overemphasizes certain frequencies might perform well in competitive games but make these richer environments feel less natural and actually feel grating.
The best gaming earbuds should make you forget you’re listening through earbuds at all and simply let you enjoy the world around you.
Horror Games: Test For Detail and Dynamic Range
Few genres rely on audio as heavily as horror.
Games like Dead Space and Alien: Isolation use sound to build suspense long before anything appears on screen. Floorboards creak, machinery hums in the distance, and subtle environmental noises constantly make you question what’s lurking around the next corner.
Testing with horror games quickly shows whether your earbuds can reproduce quiet details without losing them beneath louder effects. It also shows how well they handle dynamic range, allowing whispers and sudden scares to happen without one overpowering the other.
Racing Games: Test For Bass Control and Realism
When you’re more reliant on visuals and less on sounds, racing games feel like audio is an afterthought. But in reality they’re not just a good test of bass capabilities, but they’re more of a good test of bass quality.
In games like Gran Turismo 7 or the Forza Horizon Series, engines constantly change pitch as RPM rises and falls. Tire noise, wind, road texture, and environmental effects all mix together while you’re racing.
Strong bass certainly adds excitement, but too much of it can overwhelm everything else. A well-tuned gaming earbud keeps low frequencies powerful while still allowing the finer details of the driving experience to come through clearly.
And even as casual players, those audio cues are what you need to know when to shift if you’re driving manual, or time drifts and braking.
Rhythm Games Test Timing and Responsiveness
Rhythm games are some of the most demanding audio tests you can run – that is, when you’re playing them. But they’re also the most fun since it’s just like testing your favorite music tracks.
Whether you’re playing Hi-Fi Rush, osu!, or another rhythm-focused title, every beat matters so what you’re testing here besides the sound quality is latency. Timing has to feel immediate, consistent, and natural. Notes should sound clean and well-defined, making it easy to follow the rhythm without feeling rushed or delayed.
While rhythm games can expose latency issues, they also reveal how responsive and articulate an earbud feels. Fast transient response helps individual sounds remain crisp instead of blending into one another during complex musical passages.
Build Your Own Gaming Audio Benchmark
No single game can tell you everything about a pair of gaming earbuds.
Competitive shooters reveal imaging. Open-world adventures showcase immersion. Horror games expose detail retrieval. Racing games highlight bass control, while rhythm games test timing and responsiveness.
That’s why experienced enthusiasts rarely rely on a single benchmark. Instead, they build a small collection of games they know well and return to them whenever they test something new.
For us, the OG Modern Warfare and Black Ops series (before things got too crazy) are a good general test for most of an earbud’s capabilities: spatial audio accuracy, sound imaging and separation, tuning, etc etc; since they have the foundation of modern fps multiplayer games even in campaign mode – which can serve as a substitute for open world immersiveness.
Maybe you can even use the Benchmark mode from games like Tomb Raider 2013 and test the audio there. At the end of the day, you need to find these games that work best for you. If your earbuds are built for gaming, it only makes sense to judge them with games.
How they actually perform is the only place where it matters the most.
And if you’re interested to check out gaming earbuds that have passed a lot of our go-to games, you can check our recommendations of the top gaming earbuds in 2026.
