Gaming Headsets: Myth, Truth and How We Test

1 - Einführung und Übersicht 2 - Alles über Schall und Frequenzen 3 - Räumliches Hören, Surround und viel Voodoo 4 - Sounding: Markting-Gag oder Skill-Verstärker? 5 - Menschliche Sprache, Tiere, Bewegungen 6 - Typische Kampf- und Transportmittelgeräusche 7 - Wie wir messen und urteilen 8 - Fazit und Zusammenfassung

How and where we test

Let’s first look at the hardware used before we discuss the specifics of the premises and the measurement:

In our new measuring room in Germany, we can now measure everything from the graphics card to loudspeakers and headphones to housings and fans. The realization is also rather unusual, because it is not simply a functionally lined room. Instead, we were able to implement an idea that could otherwise only have been realized much more expensively: the space in the room.

Anyone who thinks of a large freight elevator in this illustration is right. The cabin, which weighs just under four tons, is quite spacious and also very torsion-proof, is double-walled, foamed from the factory in the walls with PU and touches the outside world only in a single place – namely, where it was parked on dampers. And since the doors are not quite as great as the remaining thick walls despite extremely thick inner cladding, we have built an additional frame on rollers, which was filled with special foam and the door opening during the measurements completely and tightly from the outside Completes.

In addition, we have lavishly and completely clad this room in several layers. The lowest layer consists of a very dense special foam (RG 75), with which we have covered the ceiling, walls, doors and floor – and in some cases multi-layered. The top layer is then special pyramid foam, which we have also installed everywhere apart from the floor. The floor was finally covered with a flooring of very soft lattice panels on the foam and a thick felt pad as a finish upwards.

Right next to our measuring room, we use another room as a control room from which we can control all tests. Thanks to a special cable shaft, we have a wide range of connection options at our disposal in the measuring room. This includes the microphone cable, another stereo NF cable (jack, chinch), speaker cable, HDMI and USB, and a switchable 230 volt connection for active speaker systems. In addition, there is the VGA bench table and the PC enclosures to be tested.

Headphone and headset tests: What is an artificial head?

For headphones and headsets, the measurement environment is a little more complex than with loudspeakers. The seat of the earcups, their closure and the distance between the sound source and the microphone (and its directional characteristics) play a major role.

Measuring this in a reasonably representative way is quite complicated, which is why we use a self-made artificial head for stereo recordings for this test, which recreates the human head. Inside the earcups we let in the microphones.

In addition to a head cast out of waxy plastic, two Shure Beta 181 C are used for this purpose, which we have thus somewhat misused. The fairly linear frequency curve of these microphone capsules convinces again and again with room sound recordings, even if these small microphones were originally intended for pure instrument recordings.

Ideal are the distortion-free high levels, which is very much in keeping with our measurement intention. For the necessary corrections, a calibration protocol is used at the end, which we had created specifically for this purpose.

We would like to point out at this point that our measurements of loudspeakers, headphones and headsets are due to our current technical capabilities to be of maximum semi-professional character.

These values are sufficient for the most objective assessment of the test objects, but they are not the same as the results of highly professional, even significantly more expensive facilities of large manufacturers and test laboratories. But as a clue they should be useful

Selected music tracks for the evaluation of frequency ranges, and spatial representation

We consciously dispense with the usual hi-fi jargon and do not want to miss out on bass thunderstorms, delicate strings or a huge stage and the like. The theoretical introduction to the genre-relevant frequency ranges and the basics of spatial hearing should be an equivalent substitute. So analytics and precision count for more than the verbally crippled marketing talk with its flowery, nebulous paraphrases.