Colin J 4576RF64
Member
SoundGuys ran a short piece saying Audeze is now taking the full reins on PlayStation's future audio gear. That is genuinely all the news there is, so I am not going to pretend to know what is shipping or when. But it is worth thinking about what it could mean, because Sony owning a planar magnetic headphone company and then handing it the console audio roadmap is a more interesting combination than it first looks.
My hesitation is that console audio has spent a decade optimising for the wrong room. Almost everything Sony has shipped on the audio side assumes headphones and a virtualiser, because that is what most players use and because it sidesteps the living room entirely. If Audeze is driving the roadmap, the likely outcome is better headphones, which is fine, and not much for those of us who have a receiver and speakers already sitting there.
What I would rather see is the boring plumbing fixed. Console headsets still tend to arrive with their own USB dongle and their own mixing app, which means game audio bypasses the AVR completely and you end up with two separate volume controls and no way to run the chat channel through the same path. Sony has the hardware and now the audio house to solve that properly instead of shipping another headset with a proprietary transmitter.
So, a question for anyone deep in this: has any console headset yet let you keep the AVR in the chain without a compromise? Every setup I have tried ends with either a splitter or accepting that game audio and everything else live in different worlds.
My hesitation is that console audio has spent a decade optimising for the wrong room. Almost everything Sony has shipped on the audio side assumes headphones and a virtualiser, because that is what most players use and because it sidesteps the living room entirely. If Audeze is driving the roadmap, the likely outcome is better headphones, which is fine, and not much for those of us who have a receiver and speakers already sitting there.
What I would rather see is the boring plumbing fixed. Console headsets still tend to arrive with their own USB dongle and their own mixing app, which means game audio bypasses the AVR completely and you end up with two separate volume controls and no way to run the chat channel through the same path. Sony has the hardware and now the audio house to solve that properly instead of shipping another headset with a proprietary transmitter.
So, a question for anyone deep in this: has any console headset yet let you keep the AVR in the chain without a compromise? Every setup I have tried ends with either a splitter or accepting that game audio and everything else live in different worlds.
