Hi all, I recently purchased a new set of Audio Technica A500's. I've been burning them in for a while and the sound is amazing, but I have a question relating to the 3d sound positioning. I have Windows 7 with the "IDT Audio" software. This comes with a control panel that lets you to tweak the audio in a number of ways, including 3 presets for games, movies and music. I have found that while using the gaming preset significantly improves the audio (i.e. a lot bassier etc.) the 3d sound positioning suffers, as opposed to disabling the IDT software all together. I'm not very knowledgable in sound engineering but it seems to me that this may just be a kind of trade off you make when you alter the audio by doing things such as increasing bass. Am I right here? Or would it just be a matter of me having to tweak the preset a little to bring the 3d sound quality back to where it was before, whilst retaining the rest of the benefits this 'gaming' preset brings?

Thanks!

I'm with khel, I've heard voices coming from behind me no matter whether I'm using speakers or headphones and I don't even have this IDT thing.

I recently got myself a new pair of headphones and noticed that while they have slightly more treble they also lack a bit of the bass my old ones had but I've realised it's actually better for the games I play. I can hear footsteps better than ever and positional audio hasn't changed from one pair to the next.

No after speaking with a guy at the headphone store and trying out about 5 different sets I went with the Audio Technica A500's as I'm more interested in using them for games rather than music, and the 500's seemed a little better on the bass.

The 3d sound positioning is actually just as good as my previous set of headphones when I disable this IDT software, however with it enabled it boosts the bass and tweaks a couple of other settings which make the sound in games amazing. The only downside is that it reduces the quality of the 3d positioning. I can definately still hear the sound coming from different angles, however it is harder to determine say footsteps or explosions happening 10m to my right from 20m. With IDT turned off I can make this distinction much more clearly, but the overall sound quality is not as good. So was just wondering if this was a side effect of pumping more bass through the headphones?

recently got myself a new pair of headphones and noticed that while they have slightly more treble they also lack a bit of the bass my old ones had but I've realised it's actually better for the games I play. I can hear footsteps better than ever and positional audio hasn't changed from one pair to the next.

+1

my audio technica 900's have decent bass, no where near what some of them do tho. Sounds so much better tho imo with superior treble > bass

I find that more bass makes explosions and the like much louder and rumbling, which for me feels more immersive. I like to feel like my ears are going to blow apart when a grenade goes off next to me :)
But positional audio is really important for immersiveness too, so would like to keep that as high quality as I can. But I don't do much online gaming where that is more important so if I have to choose, I'd probably go bass over 3d positioning.

lol, blowing my ears apart might have been a bit of an overstatement but yeah I probably do have the volume up a little high.