The Best Gaming Headphones for PC Gamers

Many gamers do not realize how important game sound is or how using the absolute best gaming headphones is mandatory for the ideal gaming experience.They still think that having some mediocre (inbuilt) speakers or cheap headphones is all they need as long as they can play Battlefield 3 in the highest possible resolution on an HDTV screen.

Sorry pal, but we are here to tell you that sound is perhaps 70% of your overall gaming experience or 50% at least.

Perfect 360° Sound is more important than HDTV

Do you really think Star Wars would have been such a huge success without a prescient George Lucas, the first director ever to hire a trained “sound artist”? This artist’s job was to always be on the lookout in the world around him for natural sounds to make the Star Wars universe sound “rusty”, as George Lucas had envisioned.

And what would Star Wars be without this grandiose RRRRROOOOOOAAAAARRRR of a passing TIE Fighter (technically a prolonged elephant’s roar), the blaster of the Stormtroopers (the artist hit a long cable supporting a tall tower in his backyard with a wrench and recorded the sound), or the buzz of Darth Vader’s light saber? For sure, Star Wars would not mean to us what it does today, it wouldn’t have made history, and Disney would not have paid billions to purchase the franchise.

Game Studios invest into 3D Sound

Today’s game studios also understand that the human brain reacts much stronger to sounds than to vision. While our brain actively processes what we see and by that puts a filter between our eyeballs and the more primitive brain centers where our emotions and instincts reside, sound (as smell) is a direct portal to our limbic brain.

For orientation in a 360° map we need 360° sound. We need to hear it so we can locate moving things in our gaming (and real) world. Noise reaches our pair of ears and the brain, with amazing speed and accuracy, calculates where the enemy is coming from.

That is why every game studio today does its best to deliver grandiose sound next to great graphics. Interestingly, game testers still put more emphasis on the graphics part and mention the game’s audio environment qualities in a half-sentence, if at all.

Best Gaming Headphones Mandatory for Success

Not us. We are here to tell you that excellent 3D sound is even more important than the visual gaming experience. Sure, we would all be disappointed if someone relegated us back to the old days shooting at far-away dots on the screen.

Do the test: Get yourself one of the best gaming headphones and play Battlefield 3 on a low graphical resolution. Yes, granted, non-ideal. Now turn it around and play on the highest possible graphics resolution but plug in very, very cheap speakers. Playing a game with sound that bad is spoiling all the fun, ain’t it?

Surprised? Don’t be. No game except perhaps for Pac-Man is any fun without the proper sound, and the better the sound experience, the better the game!

Get Yourself the Best Gaming Headphones

Convinced? Then what makes a pair of headphones qualify for this list of the best gaming headphones available for your PC?

Have you ever tried to play Battlefield without optimal sound? You hear an enemy and turn and turn to see from where she is coming because your ears are forced into believing that the attack will be coming from the wrong direction. Or have you tried find and shoot a passing helicopter with sub-par sound equipment like cheap speakers? Battlefield itself does a great job at creating an accurate 3D sound environment.

But without the best speakers or headphones? You think you know the heli is at 9 o’clock, but hey, it ain’t. Your equipment was imperfect, and now your poor little online ego is dead.

Definition of Best Gaming Headphones

Let us start with our definition of what makes the “best gaming headphones”: Only those headsets make our list that offer a fantastic sound experience while we still can hear our teammates perfectly. It is also a prerogative that our buddies hear us crystal clear too, so no good headset with a bad microphone will do.

You will probably be surprised to hear that quality is not so much about technical features. Yes, the microphone’s sensitivity (as expressed in decibel, or dB) plays a role, as does the headphone’s frequency bandwidth (expressed in Hertz [Hz] – the average human ear hears sounds between 20-20,000 Hertz).

No, since every gamer is different, some will actually be able to enjoy a headset that can go up to 28,000 Hz, though this sound is technically far outside the normal human experience. If you are old enough to remember, you will know that many Hi-Fi enthusiasts complained that the then-new CD sounded “flat”, while others claimed that the CD exactly covered what the human ear could hear anyway and heard no difference between CDs and records.

Higher Frequency Bandwidth makes sense for some

The record aficionados might have a point. There exists a phenomenon called “resonance”, meaning that even if you cannot hear the high-pitched note itself you can hear something as its echo, making the sound “fuller”. If you strike a note on a piano, several other strings will start to resonate with it, giving the single tone much more “fullness”.

If you have extremely sensitive ears and are very musical you should make especially sure that your future gaming headphones have a higher frequency range than the standard 20-20,000 Hz. Otherwise, the sound might be “flat” to you, though it is unlikely that you will miss the high notes in your favorite ego-shooter game.

Great Bass is important for Best Gaming Headphones Leaderboard

What is even more important for most (ego shooter) gamers is the bass. The lower the lowest “Headphone Response Bandwidth” in Hz actually is, the better the sound in action games even if the normal ear cannot hear sounds below 20Hz, as the resonance principle applies for bass too.

Put differently: The better the bass, the fuller the game sound experience. It is no wonder that the best gaming headphones can go as low as 15 Hz, while most standard headsets can only play back down to 20 Hz.

The Gold medalist on our Best Gaming Headphones Leaderboard actually has this extra-wide frequency band (15-28,000 Hz). More about that later.

What we also found is that the best gaming headphones do not always come with closed earcups, even though external sounds might disturb your gaming experience because closed earcups keep the game sound within and the disturbances outside. Some gamers say the closed design (circumaural) has a worse bass sound than open (supra-aural) earcups, which is not our finding.

The alternative is the open design (supra-aural), with smaller earcups just sitting on your ear and we often found them much more comfortable and better sounding. One of our best gaming headphones comes with closed ear cups. Depending on your head, you might find this design uncomfortable and after some time feels warm and sweaty below the cups.

Experiences Influence The Best Gaming Headphones Leaderboard

In our experience, the cabling is often a problem with many headsets, especially if you play for more than an hour. Feeling frustrated by being killed in the game, we destroyed more than one game DVD in our drives by moving sharply in frustration with cabling that was either too short or too entangled for the movement not to reach our PC. Furthermore, having your favorite game disc in a DVD drive exposed to such a shock is really a bad idea. The drive’s reading head crashed onto the DVD and left fatal scratches. So make sure that you always play with untangled cabling that is long enough.

Also, it can become unnerving after some time if you have more than one cable dangling around.

Another very important aspect is the ability to control the volume of the game and the chat channel separately.

Last but not least, reviews are a very effective way to do research about longer-term quality issues.  That is why we made especially sure to read the negative results on web shops like Amazon.

How Great Sound Comes Into Being

We were absolutely curious to learn how each manufacturer implemented high-quality sound for his headset because sound quality is so much more than just response bandwidth. The quality and positioning of the drivers (little speakers), the quality of cabling and connections, and the software all play a major role.

If you are familiar with home theater systems, you know about the discussion: Is a 7.1 (7 satellite speakers, one subwoofer) system better than a 5.1 or 2.1 system? In our opinion, this debate for gaming headsets is moot, because (as always) it simply depends. For us it did not play any role if it was “just” a stereo or a virtual 7.1 gaming headset. The total setup decided if a headset made the Leaderboard, not any of the components alone.

We decided to let our ears decide and not the specs, and to our astonishment, it was not the number of implemented drivers which made a headset “extraordinary” to us but mostly the digital audio converter (DAC), a small piece of hardware plugged between your PC and your headphones (in Bronze and Silver medalists). This amazing technology turned the high-quality headsets into the sound powerhouses on our best gaming headphones list.

The Gold medalist though did not need an external device to produce this breathtaking sound, which makes for more comfort playing with it. Next to the brilliant technical design of the Gold medal winner, this is due to the fact that the Silver and Bronze medalists were originally designed for console gamers and so need more cabling; A clear advantage with PC gamers for the #1 on our Leaderboard.

Best Gaming Headset: Microphone Quality

Since gaming is a team effort it is not only important that you hear exactly where the enemy is and what your teammates say, but it is as important that they hear exactly what you share with them in combat. So the headset’s microphone quality is very important and part of our testing.

The microphone has to make sure that your teammates do not hear your game sound and are not disturbed by what happens around you in your living room. The speech quality should be crystal-clear and any echo is intolerable, making noise canceling mandatory.

A Personal View

When researching and testing all these different gaming headsets to create our PCGamerhub’s Best Gaming Headphones Leaderboard we realized that there is something like “company DNA”.

What we mean is that you simply can feel if the company loves designing (gaming) headphones and innovation or if you deal with a company that has its focus elsewhere and just offers gaming headphones in its product line. They also often offer great products, but you can feel this little difference, the edge the gaming-headphones-only companies have.