So with people investing so much into video cards and the HMD, this forms only half the sensory experience of being in the game world. What audio cards and output devices are you the Pimax community looking to use for your VR experience?
Just this morning I picked up a pair of Audeze Mobius, can anyone speak or much of a difference they experience between various sound cards?
Did pimax say they are integrating audio?
If so would we use that or just plug in our own headphones anyways?
If not, would IEMS or over ears be better?
I have both: IEMs for travel and over ears for when on my PC.
(Also I use an external DAC, but I don’t think I want that in my pocket while playing VR)
As long as it’s not lower than 44khz makes no diff to most. The issue is game devs not adopting physically modeled audio. Heck as crazy as it sounds some still don’t even have htrf.
While your eyes might be walking down hallways and around corners and shoot monsters. Our ears game world has ZERO walls. I always think of it as two game worlds in parallel. If I was a game dev I wouldn’t write physically modeled audio off so easily without trying really hard.
But yeah, it’s sad state currently. Hopefully people will use steam audio plugin, google ambisonics or vive aud8o sdk.
The headset is simply a pass-through, though the 3.5mm audio jack will only be capable of transmitting stereo. HDMI, DP and USB type-c can transmit 7.1 channel surround. If you have the headphones to make use of the extra channels it makes more sense to not use the HMD audio jack. The Audeze Mobius which I picked up are for instance a wireless set.
Aureal did this many years ago. If I recall correctly, it was supported with the first Tomb Raider game (no, not the reboot). Then Creative bought them up, and pushed their inferior EAX thing instead. Today you can find e.g. AMD’s TrueAudio, using the GPU, because it already is a geometry specialized DSP.
I’m reasonably happy with Dolby Atmos for headphones. It’s no replacement for physical 7.1 (further still from 7.1.4), but I can usually tell which general direction sounds are coming from.
It’s just fancy reverb. No occlusion or reflections.
Then it’s outright falsely advertised, not just woefully undocumented. How nice. Do you have an overview of SDKs that do work? For instance Vive 3DSP is advertised to do reflection and occlusion.
That reads like a nice headset but I wouldn’t use it wirelessly for VR because of its bluetooth connection. That latency can lead to some serious disconnect between visual and audio cues.
You can connect via USB-c, I am led to believe there is no latency from bluetooth. These headsets are designed for gaming with real time head tracking and position sound modulation. There was some “hissing” on the first batch of headset over bluetooth, but this has since been fixed.
Looks like it uses multicore for prebaking reverbs and some stuff for real-time but no mention of occlusion or reflections that I could see. Steam audio sdk, google ambisonics, I think oculus has one but I don’t know if it has real occlusion and reflections or how well it will run.
Sounds promising, no pun intended. Let us know how you fare. Beat Saber is ace to detect audio visual latency discrepancies.
I have purchsed for pimax Beoplay H7 and aptx LL (low latency) transmitter. Now im using it everyday with my pc and smartphone no matter what i play or listen, i like them a lot!
I’ve spent a lot of time searching for good wireless headphones and took this model because of:
cons: not usable microphone (wont work with aptx LL and sh1t quality overall even if use with smartphone). Isnt a big issue, as pimax has it own good microphone and for PC im using rather some high quality condenser.
Bluetooth came a long way over years and it is not that crappy anymore in terms of transmitting quality and latency.
For gaming I don’t get though why to buy a wireless headphone if you are already connected to a cable anyways.
Sure if you already have TP cast or similar it will be better to go wireless all the way. If not…a small extra cable velcroed to the other cable won’t be a big deal, saving money and, in most cases, far better audio quality
I consider myself an audiophile but I have realistic expectations for different usecases.
Aureal A3D 2.0 was very similar to OpenGL API. You could pass the world geometry to the audio engine and it did occlusion and reverb plus supported 3D HRTF rendering over headphones.
It was used in Quake 3 Arena, later removed by id, and games based on quake engine. The best implementation was in Half-life (the first one). Too bad it could use up to 20-30% of CPU and was later killed by Creative.
It is a shame that after 20 years, today’s 3D audio is still subpar to the original A3D 2.0.
It’s absurd in my humble opinion. It’s literally 50% of immersion. Think about why humans evolved to determine spatial location. It’s just as important to the eyes.
You do notice games that support it though, Alien Isolation (which has been modded to support VR) physically models sound. You can hear it as the sound distorts through and around doorways. Battlefield has done an excellent job too, I don’t know if this is unique to the franchise or inherit of the Frostbite engine.
I tired the Mobius for the first time today, they are incredible. It’s hard to describe the sound emulation and head tracking effect, I am a listening to a piano piece right now and I could swear the piano was 3 feet on the opposite side of my desk.
I have a lovely pair of Sennheiser and they sound so flat in comparison. The headset needs to be run through USB to support all of its features, as a result my sound card is now wasted, thankfully it was not a flagship model.
Do the 5k + and 8k have a headphone output jack?
Yeah but something like that would need every.single.game to have support for it on a case by case basis.