TALKING TECH
MaximumPC talks to SteelSeries about its new design ethos.
Peripherals and gaming audio: they’re a crucial part of a multi-billion-dollar industry. Thousands of hours and huge levels of investment go into designing headsets that are worn across the globe. We spoke to Brian Fallon, audio guru and headset developer at SteelSeries, to see what thought processes go into designing headsets, how they develop the latest and greatest, and how important driver design is in calibrating the perfect model. Maximum PC: Where do you start when designing a new headset? What considerations do you have to make? Brian Fallon: Just like designing any product, it’s important to understand who your customer is. Who are you designing this for? And that’s where we took a step back with Arctis. We’ve been making headsets and gaming products at SteelSeries for a long time, and over the course of that time, who gamers are has changed—the reach of gaming has broadened; there are more people who you would consider gamers. It used to be that maybe only the more hardcore gamers would go out and get dedicated peripherals, but now so many people who are into gaming are really interested in getting some higher quality equipment that will enhance their gaming. They’ve spent money on a console or a PC, and they want other peripherals that are going to help enhance that experience. So, for us, it was about taking a step back, and breaking down some of the stereotypes of who these gamers are, and thinking about them in terms of the modern gamer, who is a very diverse type of person. So, we wanted to design these Arctis headsets with that in mind, and not go with what you’d stereotypically think of as a gaming headset, which has become a bulky, toy-like design. We wanted to make something that was a serious piece of audio equipment, that was going to look great, and give better performance than you’d expect out of most gaming devices.
MPC: What ergonomic decisions do you have to make when designing a headset like the Arctis?
BF: As we’ve been making headsets for a long time, we had a lot of our own research and legacy knowledge that we’ve gained. But the main ergonomic considerations are on the comfort side: figuring out how to come up with a design that is going to be able to fit all different sizes and shapes of heads. When you actually look at data of how people’s head sizes vary, it’s pretty huge, so coming up with a design that will work for everyone—and not only just fit everyone, but fit comfortably— is a big challenge. So, we go through a lot of different iterations on design. Once we’ve dialed in what kinda style and shape we want, then it’s coming up with the exact right dimensions, the right curves of things that are going to fit everybody best, getting the right amount of pressure around the ears, and distributing the weight nicely around the headset, so it feels really light.
MPC: Can you tell us SteelSeries’s thoughts on frequency response, and what makes a good driver?
BF: I put a lot of weight on headphone frequency response, and we did a lot of work on the Arctis headsets to dial in exactly the type of sound that we wanted. We’ve been talking amongst ourselves about how the gaming headset industry has steered toward this. I’m calling it “The Bass Wars,” where they just keep coming back and using the same terms, like “thundering lows” and “experience explosions,”
and it’s just been increasing amounts of bass. Frequency response is part of the equation, but distortion is a huge part of sound quality, too. As a lot of these headsets keep increasing the amount of bass, the amount of distortion is going up as well, so our take was to start with a very high quality speaker driver for the Arctis line—we actually went to our Siberia 800 series, our top-of-the line flagship headsets right now. We pulled that speaker driver from those headsets, because it’s a really nice high-performing driver, with ultra low distortion, and we worked that into the new Arctis line. Then we did the tuning from there, to go after the response that we wanted, and my focus was to design something that would sound good, no matter what you played through it. A lot of companies market to explosions and footsteps, but there are so many different types of games. Sure, in the first-person shooter realm, you might be listening for really distinct details that you want to pick out in space, and that’s really important, but there’s also the huge MMO-type games, and really immersive cinematic action games, and simulation games. There’s all kinds of different soundscapes out there, so my mantra has been that good audio is good audio, and if you create something that sounds good, no matter what you put through it, it’s going to sound great.
MPC: What are your thoughts on virtual surround? What is SteelSeries doing to make it a more enjoyable experience for a wider variety of people?
BF: All the products have a version of 7.1 surround—it’s a really important feature—and, sure, there are some people who don’t believe in that as a technology or something that they want to use. But, in all the research that we’re doing, there are far more people for whom that is a really important feature of their gaming. That said, we didn’t just want to deliver any surround solution, because there are several out there on the market, and we tested everything to find what we thought was best. So, what’s interesting with Arctis, is that even starting on the Arctis 3, which is an analog wired headset, it still comes with 7.1 surround. It’s done in software, via our SteelSeries Engine, and that one comes with our SteelSeries 7.1 solution. It’s kind of a basic way to get started with 7.1, and it works extremely well to give you good positional audio. Now, stepping up to the Arctis 5 and the Arctis 7 headsets, those come with DTS Headphone X, which is a premium surround solution. The reason is, in order to use DTS, you have to send in your headsets to DTS, who does a series of acoustic measurements on them. DTS then takes that information and bakes it into the algorithm, and returns a custom-tuned version of Headphone X to you [ the manufacturer], specifically for your headset. So, that gives you a really dialed-in ability to have super-accurate positioning in the 3D space, which is why we see that as a premium solution. I invite even those naysayers of surround sound to give DTS Headphone X a try with some of the more modern games, which have worked a lot of surround content into the way that they mix their audio, and see what the experience is like, because it’s pretty unique, and it definitely enhances the gameplay.
MPC: Can you talk to us a little about how you’re innovating in the microphone market? We’ve heard rumors of the Arctis running a bidirectional, as opposed to omnidirectional, mic.
BF: Yeah, so the microphone is probably one of the areas that I’m most excited about with Arctis. I think it’s really going to change the expectations gamers have when they buy a headset. I mean, everything I’ve read, from tech reviews to user reviews about gaming headsets—ours included—the nicest thing I’ve ever read was, “The microphone worked fine.” There’s never been anyone saying, “Oh yeah, my voice sounded great with this.” The bar is set so low, and we’ve kinda questioned, why is that? Why does it have to be that way? So, we pinpointed really early in our Arctis development that it was an area where we wanted to try to improve. To that end, we contracted with a third-party acoustic consultant firm, and gave it our headsets and our competitors’ headsets, and we had the firm put the microphones through a whole series of different acoustic evaluations. Kinda unsurprisingly, they came back mediocre at best, and one of the areas where they really fell flat was in their ability to cancel out background noise. So, you can have a great-sounding microphone, where your voice sounds good, but if it lets in too much of what’s going on in the room around you, it doesn’t really matter, because that’s going to muddy up your speech. So, our switch to a bidirectional mic was expressly to try to limit the amount of background noise that gets in. A unidirectional mic picks up from the front and rejects from the back, but it also lets in a fair amount of sound from the sides. Whereas a bidirectional mic does pick up from the front and the back, but it does so in a really narrow pattern, so if you have this mic right in front of your face, it has a good amount of proximity effect, so you can get that nice boost to the lows. Basically, you get a kinda natural boost to your overall voice, then everything from the sides gets pretty much rejected completely.
I invite even naysayers of surround sound to give DTS Headphone X a try—it definitely enhances gameplay.