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3 AM Gaming We may love our sound, but our neighbors, roommates, spouses, or local law enforcement may not. Many gamers face adversity in the form of dorm rooms, shared housing, or small apartments. But sound is such an integral part of gaming, and even if we can deal with sound at levels where if we concentrate really hard we might hear some virtual beastie behind us, we know the experience lacks something without the wall shaking subwoofer. So I asked myself, "What would Emeril Lagasse do?" I believe Food and Wine magazine has declared him a god in the kitchen. Surely, a food and media deity could solve my current Jambalaya problem (I can't get the rice consistency right); could Emeril solve my audio engineering problem? The answer is obviously no, but since I was making Jambalaya and watching cable at 3 AM, Emeril was the first person to cross my mind. So I asked myself, "Self, what would you do?" In response, I determined that I would engineer a solution from the marketplace. Thus, I began looking for a solution to the dilemma of the 3 AM gamer, those gamers who either are addicted or feel they must complete a game in a single weekend in order to successfully get on with their lives. For them I would find an answer. The answer of course involves headphones. I would need headphones that could reproduce sound with enough separation to create a 360 environment and with awesome range. As a side note, I am very hard on equipment. Having destroyed several cheap, moderately priced, and expensive headsets, I can tell you that a lot of the current PC offerings leave much to be desired. What I wanted was a professional quality headset like units used in studio recording sessions. Now, those in the recording business know Sennheiser. Their headphones and microphones are the reference to which all others are compared. I really wanted something similar to my Sennheiser HD280 pro's or HD600's. My HD 280's are my pride and joy. They reproduce surround sound for my big screen TV that rivals my regular sound system. So, I called up Sennheiser. It turns out that they have a unit for professional gamers. The unit they sent me is the PC-155, which I am told is the unit used by professional Counterstrike team Adrenaline, who Sennheiser sponsors. I figured that the FPSers would use the best unit on the market, so I was anxious to try the PC-155 out. This unit consists of the Sennheiser PC-150 with a special USB adapter. The sound reproduction is worthy of Sennheiser. I tried the unit out on Knights of the Old Republic and the sound quality is extraordinary. The reproduction of the music and sound effects rival just about any desktop audio system. The PC-155 will produce a nice 360 sound effect demonstrated by the sound of your party members running behind you. However, since the rear speakers are not fixed, like they would be if they were external, getting used to keeping ones head moderately straight to accurately reproduce the correct placement will be bothersome to some gamers. Minor annoyances aside, I seemed to have found the right headset for my task. Yet, the matter of the subwoofer remained. While the PC-155's have a very nice bass response, they won't replace a subwoofer. This would be a hard problem. The low frequencies supplied by a subwoofer will travel through any moderately thick wall, floor or ceiling, and unlike midranges or high frequencies, tend to be omni directional. Finding a system that would deliver the power of a subwoofer without waking a baby would be nigh-impossible. The solution came to me at E3 in the form of the Guitammer Company who set up in the small hardware section of the conference. It seems that drummers and bass players have problems distinguishing their own instruments amongst the cacophony generated during a live stadium performance. A product line called Buttkicker rectifies this problem by supplying low frequency directly to a body by attaching to furniture instead of driving air. The direct transfer of low frequency energy to the body gives the much desired feeling of a subwoofer without all that messy "sound." This allows the percussion and bass musicians to keep in time even in overwhelming conditions. On the movie front, the solution is so satisfying that IMAX chose to install Buttkickers in the seats of several of its theaters. Guitammer makes a full line of Buttkickers, and if you have a home theater, definitely check out their Buttkicker LFE model for your couch. But, for gamers, Guitammer released a new model, the Buttkicker Gamer. This model attaches to your chair to give you that full force you need when in game things blow up. The total cost of such a system, both PC-155 headset and Buttkicker Gamer, ranges from $250 to $300 dollars. Ideally, the two companies would work something out to push a combined cost to around the $150 range. Sure, the system definitely is not cheep. But then again, neither is divorce, eviction, or having to dispose of your dorm-mate's dead body. Also, I did come up with a solution which is more than I can say for that slacker Emeril. Happy Gaming. |
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