Hello Sound Blaster fans, it’s been a while here for the blog…but we’re back and better than ever!

Earlier this year we shipped our first headsets under the Sound Blaster brand in the Sound Blaster World of Warcraft Series. These were the first headsets to be powered by our amazingly powerful THX TruStudio Pro audio enhancement technology. And now we’re going full THX power across the board.

For USB offerings we’ve just released the versatile  Sound Blaster Surround 5.1 Pro, our tiny USB dynamo in your pocket  Sound Blaster Go! Pro, and lastly our audiophile quality offering X-Fi HD. All three of these products are enhanced with THX TruStudio Pro technology.

On the internal side our highest SnR and arguably best sounding card we’ve ever made, the Sound Blaster Titanium HD is gathering critical praise wherever it’s been reviewed, being seen as a huge upgrade from onboard sound and delivering sound details you surely never heard before in your music and games.

And of course we’re proud to have launched our first headset in our Sound Blaster Tactic3D lineup. The Sound Blaster Tactic3D Alpha. This headset is fully enhanced with THX TruStudio Pro to go way beyond 7.1 sound and enter the realm of 3D Surround. Why limit yourself to 7 virtual channels?

So taking a quick step back. “Virtual Surround” on headsets is just that. It’s virtually taking multiple sound channel information and applying effects to those sound streams to trick your brain into thinking it’s hearing things as if they were around you. Now going forward, saying a headset is 7.1 is actually rather misleading. It’s terminology used by us marketing folks to make it easy to explain to the masses that a headset is “surround” capable.

Now the .1 channel is technically the “subwoofer” in a surround environment. Almost every headset claiming to be 7.1 is a 2.0 headset (2 speaker drivers) that are simulating surround by applying various effects. You don’t have 7 speakers in the headset, and certainly don’t have a dedicated subwoofer strapped to your noggin (that would definitely cause some neck cramping). Some headsets have tried to wedge multiple speakers into their configuration, but when you have less than an inch of actual physical separation between the physical speaker drivers, the “surround” effect is not nearly as convincing to your brain as using audio effects. The headsets are capable however of receiving these sound channels, but how they reproduce the surround effect, and how that effect is delivered to your brain is where the men and boys are separated.

What we’ve done at Creative is take the whole surround channel setup several steps beyond 5.1 or 7.1. Our THX TruStudio Pro technology takes those multiple channel outputs and translates them to create the virtual surround effect, but also BLENDS those channels on the fly to create virtually an unlimited amount of surround channels. And with THX TruStudio Pro we also are able to use a technique called elevation filters which allows for sounds to be created in an axis that is above or below you as the user as well. So rather than having a “ring” of virtual speakers surrounding you as you would with a 5.1 or 7.1 setup, you have a SPHERE of virtual speakers. This makes for a much more realistic audio experience and allows you to pinpoint sounds in 3D space. The other key difference is we can simulate surround even off of basic stereo channel information (the more channels the better…so if you’re playing a game turn ON surround sound! But we’re more than capable of simulating surround even with stereo channels only). That’s where being a SOUND company makes a huge difference since most games don’t utilize elevation filters in their games (yet), we can simulate these by looking at the streams in real-time and analyzing where they are placed in relation to the users avatar in-game. Giving our algorithms a good sense of where the sound is positioned in space. Even a slight difference is interpreted by the brain as vastly different, and this leads to a much more convincing surround effect that conventional 7.1 or 5.1 tech. This is something you just can’t get unless you live and breathe sound products like we do every day (and have been “doing” for decades now). We develop our tech in-house and with partners like THX, as well as work directly with game developers to make sure we’re living up to how THEY want their games to be heard by the masses.

Over the next few days I’ll be talking about our new TacticProfile system that comes with the Tactic3D lineup. We’ve actually gone way past just making a product for gamers, we’ve incorporated their ears into the product and for the first time ever are allowing people to hear their games exactly how the pros hear them by remapping our massive amount of customization options with THX TruStudio Pro in one simple click of a TacticProfile. And you’ll hear from those pro gamers directly how this has changed their way of gaming. I’ll also be giving a sneak peek on some of the new things to come down the Creative / Sound Blaster product pipeline.

As always, there’s more to come!

Ryan (DigitalRonyn)