Gaming

I do all of my gaming on headphones these days, something about getting older, crotchety downstairs neighbor, and something mumbly about headphones providing the most uncompromising audio experience for the least amount of cash.

The following hardware was used to test the Xonar U7:

Tomb Raider

Kicking my Civ V habit, and getting me back on track to finish this article, some friends persuaded me to try this one.  The rebooted Tomb Raider is a terminally pretty game, but it also has an amazing, immersive audio track.  It’s also a great way to test out the U7’s new Dolby surround modes.  Some may remember Dolby Headphone, which simulated surround sound within your headphones, and Dolby HTv4 doesn’t change that. In fact, Dolby still use the same algorithms, just changed the branding.  The other Dolby HTv4 modes are less critical with Tomb Raider, the dialog enhancer and the dynamic range compressor just don't bring much to the game's already superb sound.

So, imagine yourself standing on a cliff next to a waterfall.  It’s a lot of noise, thrashing water, thrumming deep into the pool at the base of the fall.  Now, enable headphone surround.  Now imagine that plunging waterfall played through a speaker at the end of a large pipe.  That’s the sound of Dolby Headphone.  Like I mentioned before, nothing wrong with the technology, but the engineers at Crystal Dynamics made the waterfall sound right in the studio.

Of course, you also get the Xear Headphone, so there are actually two headphone surround modes you get with the Xonar U7.  To my ears, the Dolby HTv4 is the more subtle of the two, and doesn’t change the tonal balance of the sound like Xear Headphone does.  For maximum enjoyment, I left them both disabled. I loved the game that way.

Skyrim

You know, I avoided this game for such a long time and only recently started playing it. I like it. I didn’t want to, but I do. The sound, however is a bit less impressive than the graphics.  I had some trouble with the Xonar U7 and volume, it would not go any higher just above a whisper.  Switching to the Sparrow with its volume knob and gargantuan gain alleviated that. Hey, win one for the dedicated headphone amp.

With games, I still ain't sold on the surround sound headphone modes.  Creative did try to change that with occlusion modeling and other features in their EAX extensions, and it almost seems sad that there wasn't more adoption of those technologies from developers.  Most games just aren't produced with these features in mind, but for example in Tomb Raider, the sound is done right from the beginning.  As a sound card, however, the U7 was rock solid in all the games I threw at it, including the sedate Civ V to the bare knuckle arcade throwback, Dragon's Lair.

Let's see how the U7 does with more mundane tasks like posting on Facebook and listening to Youtube.