You don't need a living room full of speakers to get true surround-sound.
When you’re hunting down your virtual prey, trying to locate which corridor they’ve snuck down, having surround sound can be the difference between plugging them full of rail-gun rounds or tasting the sour tang of rocket pie. There’s one problem though – when the rest of the house wants to hit the hay, reverting to stereo headphones makes it hard to maintain the competitive edge. The Sonar 5.1 headphones promise to solve this problem by supplying true surround sound within headphones.
Before installing the Sonars, it’s necessary to disable any audio devices previously used on the PC. You see, the Sonar 5.1s aren’t just headphones – they also include an integrated audio chipset that takes care of audio decoding, hence the fact that they connect to the PC via USB... and only via USB. If you’ve outlaid a few hundred dollars on a high end sound card, it’ll lay idle while the Sonar’s budget C-Media CM106L sound processor, housed in a small case on the headphone cable, does all the work. As a result of this short-sighted design, the headphones are limited to PC use only; without 3.5mm minijacks there’s no way to hook the headphones up to regular audio devices such as an iPod or TV.
This small little USB-box of limitation drives four separate drivers per earpiece; one for the centre channel, one for the rear, one for the front and finally a tiny subwoofer that even Stewart Little would shun. Considering there are so many drivers, it’s no surprise that the quality of each is lacking. Compared to a decent set of Sennheisers (the PC150s are still our fave for gaming, offering great performance at an affordable cost), the sound offered by the Sonars sounds like it’s coming through cotton wool padding. It’s not horribly bad, but the high end, crispy range of the audio spectrum is very lacking.
However, they actually do a decent job of providing directional audio. It’ll take a little while for your ears to “learn” where the noises are coming from, but once you’re use to them it’s very easy to determine whether sounds are coming from the front or rear. Because there are so many drivers in the headphones, the entire headset is markedly heavier than any other headphones we’ve used, and fatigue set in after a short while. The thick cable doesn’t help, along with its integrated sound box, adding to the total weight pressing down on the user’s neck.
Given that VoIP is so commonly used in today’s online games, the included microphone is a welcome feature. There’s a slight problem though – we couldn’t get this to work in any of the games we tried. Teamfortress 2, Battlefield and Lord of the Rings Online all failed to recognise the microphone, yet it functioned perfectly within the Windows Sound Recorder. This failure to function was indicative of a much bigger issue with the headphones; the software driving the headphones makes Creative’s crashware look positively rock-solid.
To put it bluntly, the Sonar software crashed more often than a drunk driver in a demolition derby. Every single time we tried to play a game with these headphones, the PC blue-screened. Many games wouldn’t even boot, others crashed when we tried to adjust the audio options. On the rare occasions when the game did work, we’d barely begun to appreciate how cool the 3D positioning was before being greeted by the PC’s POST screen as it spontaneously rebooted. We promptly visited the Cyber Snipa site to get the latest drivers; unfortunately they didn’t make a lick of difference.
So it seems that the holy grail of surround sound headphones still eludes gamers. Even if the software gets sorted, the issues of average sound quality, limited connectivity and an uncomfortable weight remain, making these headphones an expensive novelty item in dire need of stable drivers.