7.1 surround sound

Technology and Gaming Help and Support
#1

Some of you might remember some odd weeks ago where I asked you guys to help me find a good headset, after my Steelseries broke. I went on and bought a Roccat Kave… and it has also went to shit now. I’m going to buy the Logitech G35 soon, because I found them nearby for a bit less than usual.

My PC has five jackstick ports, two in the front and three behind. Two pink ports of these five are both for the mic. A green port behind says “LINE OUT” and a blue one says “LINE IN”. Then there’s the green one in the front, that simply has the drawing of a headset under it. My motherboard’s specs say that it supports 7.1 surround sound (I don’t have a dedicated sound card), but I’m still a bit doubtful. I have a Gigabyte B75M-D3H motherboard.

So my question is: does my PC support 7.1 surround sound?

#2

This is actually the headset I use. The 7.1 surround is emulated through the Logitech software, and activated via a small physical switch on the back of the left earcup. Whether your pc supports 7.1 should be irrelevant since it’s actually just virtual 7.1 surround. Don’t let that disappoint you though, I can say with confidence that you’ll probably care less once you hear it :wink:

But to answer your actual question, your spec says it supports it, so yes it does.

#3

Headsets don’t have true 7.1 like the above post says and I’d recommend you stop caring about it because its bogus.

Your mobo does apparently support 7.1 with a front panel module but by default no.

Hardly any games at all actually support 7.1 to my knowledge on PC. Most games support 5.1 but true 7.1 support is rare iirc. Upon googling it apparently it still none I guess actually.

#4

In addition I recommend you start getting some better quality headsets, like Sennheisers for example.

#5

I looked up the G35, and they use Dolby Headphone. Dolby Headphone isn’t true surround, it’s virtual surround. The headphones themselves are stereo headphones. So basically, the headphones will take the sound from your game and manipulate it to make it sound like surround sound. It’s actually a pretty cool effect: I just got a nice pair of headphones and an audio card with Dolby Headphone, and I’ve been playing Skyrim with it. It’s almost certainly not as good as true surround, but it makes it easy to tell where sounds are coming from. Stuff positioned behind you is quieter and takes on a bit of a “tinny” distortion, the type you get when you cup your hands around your ears.

So, I don’t think it matters whether your motherboard supports surround; the headphones take stereo output and mock it up to sound like surround. Also, they’re USB headphones, so even if you get 7.1 surround from the 3.5mm jack on the back of your motherboard, these headphones wouldn’t be able to connect to it.

EDIT: I just realized The Master addressed all of this. Good show, that man.

#6

This is very educational content and written well for a change. It’s nice to see that some people still understand how to write a quality post…
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