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DTS has been a big name in the surround sound world almost as long as Dolby, but they’ve always had more of a focus on modernized technology and bells and whistles compared to their elder counterpart. They were the first company to ship movie soundtracks on separate optical discs for higher quality audio. Where Dolby has essentially only released two headphone surround virtualization systems over the years with Dolby Headphone and Dolby Atmos, DTS has pushed constant updates to their gaming technology, and made aggressive inroads to get their mixing environment into the hands of the people actually making games.
Now, their DTS Sound Unbound app is finally available on both the PC and the Xbox One after a months-long delay bringing it to the console platform. The app allows you to trial and unlock two technologies for gaming: DTS Headphone: X 2.0, and DTS:X decoding. Unlocking both costs $19.99. The former is a 3D surround system that turns your headphones into a simulated studio listening environment, with sound that sweeps all around your position in 3D space. The latter is a software decoder primarily for movie soundtracks, but which will also hopefully be used directly in games in the future.
This new version of DTS Headphone will properly render the 3D audio tracks in the same small handful of Xbox/PC titles that also support Windows Sonic or Dolby Atmos. Of course, Sonic is free and Atmos’s full unlock is five dollars less than DTS, so what do you get for those five extra dollars? A different approach to audio, and access to over 500 different profiles based on measuring real headphones in a lab.
DTS Headphone has always sounded more “Speaker-like” to my ears than its competitors, and that’s no accident. Its default virtualization profile was crafted by taking precise measurements inside DTS’s reference mixing room, which they then mimic over headphones as best as possible by using binaural audio processing tricks. This approach of trying to copy a real speaker-filled mixing room gives DTS Headphone a large sense of space…
