New surround sound headset + audio card - for fps mmo Options

[fenixlight]

I Wish to buy a new headset and audio card to improve my gaming experience.

I play a competitive fps mmorpg, where sound is a big part of information you recive and need to react on.

There is sounds, such as when you are channeling a spell which is relatively loud. You are able to recongize which spell is being cast dependent on the sound. This is pretty easy, even with my current setup. (onboard soundcard and senheiser pc350).

Another type of sound is foodsteps, footsteps are very low volume and hard to hear. The direction from where the footsteps is comming from is also important, so u can know if someone is sneaking up on you. Therefore i need a pair of good 7.1 headphones.

I was told there is also some audio cards, that can enhance sounds and make for example the small sounds of footsteps louder. I want to be able to hear footsteps from as far away as possible.

my question is if, anyone have any audio cards and headphones they can recommend for the most optimal sound ?

my budget is max 600$

[andy o]

I don't know a lot about gaming audio, but does this game require EAX to get you multichannel sound? I played Dirt 2 both on an HDMI connection and with headphones on Win 7, using Dolby Headphone, and it was great. If you don't require EAX, I think you should go for a Dolby Headphone solution. I'm not sure if you can get an EAX 5.0 device with DH, cause Creative have their own (very crappy) CMSS 3D competitor. The so-called 7.1 headphones with multiple drivers in each cup sound like a useless gimmick to me, unless they also do some processing instead of just channeling the 7.1 audio to different drivers.

This post has been edited by andy o: Feb 8 2012, 17:10

[fenixlight]

I dont know much about sound in general but, according to what i could find from a google search the game ( darkfall online ) does not use eax.

Ingame i can adjust a bar called "maximum Number of 3d sounds" from 8 to 512


ill look more into it and try get more information

edit:

someone wrote:

"The last change I made was swapping out my non-3D accelerated sound card for a Auzentech X-Fi Forte. Using onboard sound is fine when you're just standing around or small scale PvP, but once you get into sieges with 100+ people, all the sound spam just eats up your processor. By installing a dedicated 3DFX sound card I freed up my processor to focus on the graphical elements of the game. Not only does the game no longer sound retarded from running only 8 sounds but I am also getting directional sound. I can hear exactly which direction that mounted guy is coming from or where that miner is hacking away at a metal node. I went with the Auzentech version of the X-Fi which is a little more expensive than some of the Creative branded ones, but comes without the bloated software."

This post has been edited by fenixlight: Feb 9 2012, 16:18