Don’t get tired, get even
Playing games can be physically and mentally demanding, especially in a competitive environment. EPOS engineers ensure players perform at their best no matter how long the session.
At EPOS, we apply our passion for excellence in audio engineering to ensure that our products maximize a player’s performance and enjoyment while minimizing the effect of what experts in the field of psychoacoustics call “hearing fatigue”.
The simplest way to understand the phenomenon is to think about the effort needed when you’re in a restaurant and trying to listen to a person having a conversation on another table. It requires you to concentrate hard, and your brain works overtime processing the audio coming into your ears to filter out the irrelevant background noise. Now imagine doing that for two hours non-stop – but you’re in a different room, listening to the restaurant on headphones. The less clear the audio, the more tired you will get over an extended period.
It’s also one of the reasons why people are so exhausted at the end of a day of internet conference calls – poor headsets make participation all the more tiring as people struggle to understand to all the other participants.
When you’re playing a game, you are bombarded with important audio cues – at the same time, you may be listening to your team-mates over a voice channel. Play for a few hours using a poor headset, and you will be exhausted as your brain is constantly cleaning up the muddy audio it’s having to process. This takes a lot of mental energy, which over time will lead to listening fatigue.
We use the same approach to this problem as we do with all our audio technologies: it’s all about balance. You might think that by tuning the audio to make the voice or other important audio super-clear would be the right solution, but if it sounds unnatural, that will tire your brain! At EPOS, we first start by making the speakers in our headsets deliver a natural, balanced sound.
Clearly, our brains can interpret real sound, so making the audio sound natural is a good starting point. From here, we give you the tools to adjust the audio according to your gaming environment and personal preferences. Using the EPOS Gaming Suite for example, you can adjust the EQ slightly and save it as a preset for each game individually. You can turn down the reverberation in our 7.1 surround sound implementation if the game is sounding a little muddy.
What we don’t do is artificially inflate the bass response to hide the basic shortcomings of a cheap headset speaker. Nor are we satisfied with a midrange frequency response chart which deviates wildly from the theoretical ideals – in this crucial region of audio, we keep the response as accurate as we can to help you not only hear your team-mate call out a warning but also help you know who it was who raised the alert without having to divert your concentration from the action. And as experts in the field of psychoacoustics and because we have developed EPOS Surround technology in house, we know that crystal-clear higher frequencies are vital for your brain to interpret directional audio properly.
As audio engineers, we design for all those requirements simultaneously, because it’s only by delivering the whole acoustic experience well that we can mitigate the effects of hearing fatigue. Gamers want to play for hours when they have the time set aside, and it’s our job to make sure that our products are not the components that introduce fatigue to that experience!
Our commitment to excellence in engineering helps you play for longer and perform at your highest level from your first match to your last.