George Lucas is said to have said that ‘Sound is 50 percent of the moviegoing experience’. Which is actually a very silly statement. You can’t divide an experience between two of its contributing factors. Absent sound or absent vision, you’re probably getting just five per cent of the combined experience.
Nonetheless, it captures some essence of not only movie-going, but game playing. Shooting the enemy is enormously more satisfying when there’s a visceral thunk from the sound of your 5.56mm rifle than a mere sketch of what’s happening from some plastic computer speakers. Your game score can even be higher if you can accurately and instantly detect the direction of hostiles from their sound.
Likewise for ambience. Where mood is part of the gaming experience, much is delivered almost unconsciously through a sound field that may be as much behind the player as in front, and often includes a deep bass throbbing that will be inaudible to the player with inadequate speakers.
To get that – or as much of it as you can afford to spend – means making decisions. And that in turn depends upon how you do your gaming. Fundamentally, the choices come down to Desktop vs Lounge room, Stereo vs Surround, and the specific type of speaker that you want.
THE DESKTOP VS THE LOUNGE ROOM
At a desktop is where most gamers will be, most of the time. But some will want to take advantage of a large screen home theatre system, maybe even with a front projector. There are pros and cons to each. Serious action play favours desktop because gaming monitors are faster than TVs. Add a thirty millisecond lag before you see the bad guy emerge and you’re doubling your reaction time. (TVs and home theatre projectors typically delay the image by 80 to 200ms in normal mode, and even in game mode, if available, 40 to 50ms.)
But both need addressing, because the requirements are very different.
SIZE
The first difference is size. Not physical size – although that can come into it – but the size of the sound. A lounge room sound system must have the power and authority to fill a large space with sound. Fill it, not just deliver the sound directly from the speakers to your ears.
Your desktop system does not need to fill any space. The front speakers are just eight or nine hundred millimetres away from your ears. Most of the sound you will hear comes directly from them, not from reflections (more about that shortly). Sound intensity, like many physical phenomena, is subject to an inverse square law: if you double the distance away from the sound source, the intensity falls away to one quarter strength. You’re sitting close to your speakers so you need less volume from them, which means your system needs less power.
That in turn makes for smaller ‘main’ speakers. Which is why there are so many compact computer stereo systems available. Many of these can do a respectable job, so long as they front left and right speakers are accompanied by a subwoofer. A small computer speaker – regardless of talk of woofers and passive radiators and such – can’t produce a decent level of deep bass. But a small computer speaker – well designed, with good components – can produce midrange and high frequencies for an enjoyable performance.
A cautionary word on power. Don’t worry too much about how much power the system is said to produce. Even if the figures are honest, the power output of an amplifier is only part of the story when it comes to how load a speaker system can go. An equally important part of the story is how efficient the speakers are.
In hifi, that’s a specification often quoted – as a ‘sensitivity’ measure. But most computer speakers have the amps built in, so this figure isn’t quoted. Even ‘SPL’ or output level measures aren’t of much use because there aren’t really many standards for consistent measurement. You’re going to have to go by ear, literally, for this kind of thing.
NEAR FIELD VS AMBIENCE
A loudspeaker does not ‘beam’ its sound from its cones to your ears. It emits the sound in all directions. Or more precisely, at high frequencies the sound comes out in kind of the shape of a cone, and at lower frequencies it spreads out more evenly. The higher the frequency, the tighter the cone. Yet even at very high frequencies, a significant proportion of the sound is going off to the sides, and upwards and downwards.
So what?
If you are sitting close to a speaker, you are getting most of what you’re hearing directly from the speaker. This is called ‘Near Field’. It can be quite close to headphones in terms of precision, but without the annoying sense that the sounds are located in the middle of your brain (I know, I know, ‘surround’ headphones. We’ll get to them.) To get the best out of Near Field speakers, they ought be aimed very particularly (see Box ‘Point your speakers’). If possible, have them sitting a little forward of the monitor to reduce acoustic reflections from its surface.
But things are different in your lounge room. Because you are relatively distant from the speakers a much greater proportion of the sound that you hear is not coming directly from them, but after reflections from the walls, ceiling, floor and furniture. The room itself and how it is finished is making a substantial contribution to the sound. That can soften the impact, slightly reduce vocal coherence and add a slight delay. Sound takes around three milliseconds to travel one metre. Speakers at three metres can add nearly thirty per cent to your reaction time when audio is the cue.
STEREO VS SURROUND
Do you want stereo or surround? The choice isn’t as simple as you might think.
If your budget is unlimited and you don’t have troubles with space, then surround is the way to go. Games have surround sound tracks. Many of them make use of the increased directional information inherent in surround. Surround sound can be spookily engaging.
But … there’s always a but. If you have a fixed amount of money you will need to decide whether it should be concentrated on a higher quality 2.1 speaker system, or spread out over an inevitably lower quality multichannel system. That will depend a lot on your use of your system. If you’re gaming and only gaming, the balance likely tilts more towards surround. But if you spend half your time listening to music, better quality stereo is probably the way to go.
SURROUND CHOICES
With surround the options pile up. You can have 4.1, 5.1, 7.1 and now 9.1 and 11.1. The .1 is the subwoofer – that’s not negotiable. Not only is it needed for the bass from the small main speakers, surround sound includes a ‘Low Frequency Effects’ channel dedicated solely to bass. If your game is going to rumble the air, it’ll likely be contained in that channel.
The other figure is the number of main speakers. The defacto standard is 5.1, which has left and right stereo speakers, a centre channel speaker and two ‘surround’ speakers. With this configuration, the surrounds are mostly to your sides, just slightly to the rear. For years that was the standard for Dolby Digital and DTS (where available). But these standards all come from cinema, and so to some degree reflect the requirements of delivering sound to a lot of people in a very large room.
That’s why there’s a centre channel. If it’s just you with your computer sitting directly in front of you, do you even need a centre channel? The stereo speakers will create a virtual centre channel image (called a ‘phantom’ centre in the olden days of the 1990s). The main point of a centre channel is to locate the central sounds better for those people who are not in the ‘sweet’ spot for the main speakers.
And 7.1 channels is all about that large cinema. It adds two ‘surround rear’ speakers which are reasonably close together directly behind the listener. Its purpose: to locate surround sounds which are supposed to sound like they’re coming from the back of the room. They make little difference to the person who is sitting smack bang in front of a monitor in the correct position.
Any properly set up 5.1 channel system is supposed to mix down the two surround rear channels into the regular surround channels, so you shouldn’t be missing anything.
(‘Supposed’, ‘shouldn’t’; am I equivocating? Sure am. There are no guarantees that any given system will do the job properly.)
DOLBY ATMOS AND DOLBY SURROUND
And so surround sound rested for many years. But in the last couple something new has appeared: Dolby Atmos. This does two things. One is it fills in more gaps, but this time real gaps that offer something new for the solo user. Specifically, it delivers real overhead sounds, something that has been missing in surround thus far.
And it does something else that might be even more exciting for the future of gaming than it is for movies. Sound tracks have traditionally been finished products, so the placement of loudspeakers have had to largely conform to specification. A game might dynamically mix in play-specific items, but the underlying soundtrack was fixed.
Dolby Atmos does away with all that fixed stuff. In theory at least, the speakers can be wherever, and all the sounds can be placed wherever. There are up to 128 audio tracks, each with metadata specifying where its sound should be located at any instant. Everything can, potentially, by manipulated by the game.
In the home, Dolby Atmos can support speaker systems from 7.1 to … 34.1. And even more in the cinema.
In practice, a Dolby Atmos system will be five or seven surround speakers and two or four height speakers. For a desktop system, two height speakers is likely enough.
Don’t worry: there’s no need to cut holes in the ceiling or bolt loudspeakers up there. ‘Atmos enabled’ loudspeakers are available which shoot sound upwards at the ceiling and bounce it down towards you.
Along with the introduction of Atmos Dolby re-jigged its terminology and introduced a new sound processing mode called ‘Dolby Surround’, re-using the name of its very first home surround format which first appeared in 1982. This replaces Dolby Pro Logic IIz and its predecessors, processing two or multichannel sound into full surround sound including height.
There are problems with Dolby Atmos/Surround for the gamer: desktop implementations are implausible without applying a lot of money. It isn’t just a matter of the loudspeakers, the processor needs reasonable grunt to dynamically generate and allocate the necessary channels.
In the home theatre field a receiver capable of the minimum five surround/two height channels will set you back a grand or more before you start adding loudspeakers. You will need to get the Dolby Atmos audio signal out of your computer to the audio processor. Atmos uses Dolby TrueHD as its base, so your graphics card will need a HDMI connection (optical and coaxial aren’t enough) which supports bitstream audio pass through to your audio system. Home theatre receivers are not compatible with high frame rate video signals, so your gaming will be locked into 60 hertz.
And then there’s the question of games. So far only Star Wars: Battlefront, only just released, has appeared with Atmos sound (only in the PC version).
So, for the moment, Dolby Atmos is for gamers who are prepared to power their many speakers with a new, fairly expensive home theatre receiver.
TIME ALIGNMENT AND BALANCE
The main point of surround sound is to provide audible directional cues. But your sense of the direction of a sound is almost entirely determined by timing. Your brain has a powerful processor built in that compares the timing between sounds arriving at your left and right ears and calculates the direction from that. That timing difference is, at most, around one thousandth of a second (ie. a millisecond).
But sound takes time to travel. If your front left speaker is 800mm from your head and your surround left speaker is 1100mm from your head, the surround sound is going to reach you a full millisecond after the front sound. That wrecks the precision of the audible cues.
So any surround sound system must be placed so that all the speakers are the same distance from you. Nah, just kidding. The important thing is that the sound issuing
from the speakers arrives at the same time. If the speakers can’t be placed at the same distance, then the audio must be processed so that the sound to be delivered by the closest speakers is sound electronically delayed to correct the timing.
That is a standard feature of all surround sound processors, but even if you’re using the surround processor on your motherboard, its control panel should have a facility to align the timing of the speakers (usually by setting their distances) and balancing their level. Modern home theatre receivers usually have an auto calibration system. You plug in a microphone and the unit generates a bunch of test tones by which it determines speaker distances, speaker levels and even EQ.
SPEAKER TYPES
Which brings us to the speakers that you need. By speakers I mean audio systems, for a speaker without an amplifier can do nothing.
You basically have a choice from four options, although you may choose to have both headphones and one of the others.
HEADPHONES
There are several advantage of headphones, some of them very obvious – ie. less annoying to others in the room or house. Another is that in terms of quality for dollar, you can’t beat them. A set of astonishingly fine headphones will set you back less than a thousand dollars. For an equivalently good audio system you’d be looking at ten times that.
But beware: the better your headphones, the more obvious the weaknesses of the built in audio circuits in your computer. Pretty soon you’ll want to get an external USB DAC/headphone amplifier to improve the sound.
There is also disadvantages to headphones. For example, as loud as you play them, you won’t get the visceral impact that can be transmitted by a set of powerful loudspeakers and subwoofer. That affects your body as much as your ears.
There are surround headphones in addition to stereo ones. In fact, there are two ways that surround headphones can be implemented: by packing a set of headphones with multiple drivers replicating in miniature a regular set of loudspeakers. Or by processing the sound to create a ‘virtual’ surround field with normal headphones.
The first way might seem like the best way, but that’s far from clear unless the sound for each channel is processed by the headphone electronics. The reason things sound like they’re behind you is because sounds seem different when they have to make their way around your ears and head, and there’s some space required for that.
Virtual surround is based on modelling how sounds vary depending on the direction they’re coming from. One of the better ones is Dolby Headphone, which was originally purchased by the US firm from a Sydney company called Lake Technologies. This can do a decent job of surround, and even stereo (it makes the sound appear to be coming from some distance in front of you), but results will vary depending on the individual. The modelling is for some kind of average person, but everyone has different ear and head shape, and these are what modify the sound so that we can pick the direction.
Both kinds of surround headphones have one other weakness: part of the way we detect the direction of sounds is by how it changes when we move our heads. Since the headphones move with your head, that doesn’t help in the slightest.
COMPUTER SPEAKERS
The quality range of computer speakers is extremely wide. There are many at the low end that should simply never be used at all.
The audio snob in me wants to insist that the 2.1 systems you can get at chain electronics retailers for around $100, and the $200 5.1 systems, should be avoided as well. But the truth is that there have been marked advances over the years so that some of these can deliver reasonable, if limited, performance. Their weakness will be in impact, overall level and the depth of the bass from their compact subwoofers.
You should look for a brand name. Something like computer peripheral firm Logitech is one, of course, but there are also quite a few loudspeaker specialists that have special computer speaker model. For example, Klipsch, Bowers & Wilkins, Harman Kardon and plenty of others.
SOUNDBARS
Soundbars first appeared perhaps ten years ago to solve a home theatre problem: how to get surround sound without having to put loudspeakers all around the room. That was indeed the focus for quite a few years, with some incorporating more than forty little independently powered speakers to ‘steer’ the sound where it needed to be.
Perhaps. Sometimes. All of these depended a great deal on the types of acoustically reflective surfaces in the room, distances of the boundaries and so on. Surround performance was iffy. They would generally be able to give the impression of surround sound, but the direction from which sounds were supposed to be coming rarely matched how they were actually delivered.
In recent years, they’ve adopted a more realistic purpose: decent stereo sound from an unobtrusive package which can sit at the foot of an LCD TV, often accompanied by a subwoofer.
As with home theatre, I would not recommend them unless you’ve got significant space problems. And even then, I’d suggest 2.1 is going to be more flexible.
There are some smaller soundbars (the home theatre ones are typically 800mm to 1000mm wide) designed for use with computers. But, again, they lack flexibility.
HIFI SPEAKERS
Of course, if you’re talking a lounge room system, you’ll be wanting the best high fidelity speakers you can afford, along with a home theatre receiver. You will be using the system for movies and music in addition to games.
But why not consider the same for your desktop? The main advantage of computer speakers is that they are very small. But do you have a bit of space on either side of your main monitor? Two hundred millimetres, or even a bit less, will do. Then consider a pair of compact high fidelity loudspeakers. And a home theatre receiver. And a subwoofer. You can start with just the speakers and receiver, and add the subwoofer later.
Advertisers: don’t read this bit! Neither the receiver nor the speakers even need to be new, although you can get some pretty good deals. The receiver doesn’t need HDMI inputs, just analogue and digital (coaxial and optical). eBay and Gumtree will have your needs at a reasonable price. As I write, there are compact speakers from Australian brand Krix and Danish brand Jamo at the top of the audio section on Gumtree from $200 to $400, and suitable home theatre receivers from $20 to $300.
A wise choice from there will deliver a more powerful, better sounding desktop audio system than almost all dedicated computer speaker systems.
BUYING
This article has spent a lot of time talking about the kinds of things to look for and the kinds of speaker systems which might best suit your needs. But it cannot make the final choice for you. If you wish to achieve a particular subjective effect – and believe me, with great speakers music and games both will be even more thrilling – then you’re going to have to do some listening.
That means that in order to optimise your purchase you will need to come to an arrangement with a store that has speakers that might look like worth candidates for your system – unless you’re buying second hand, in which case you’ll have to google reviews. But with new speakers tou want to be able to go into the store with at least some music that you know and want to get the best out of. And if you’re gaming machine is portable, you’ll want to take that in.
Then you’ll want to listen at the levels you want to enjoy at home. Thus the need for an arrangement. You need to pre-arrange with the store so you can come in at a time when it isn’t swarming with customers.
Most stores will be cooperative. Any that isn’t clearly has insufficient desire for your money.