Xbox is Still Woefully Behind on Audio

Sound Matters

Sony’s latest Pulse earbuds and headset (pictured) both have full wireless PC compatibility out of the box, and the headset will even work wired with an Xbox. Microsoft’s competing Xbox Headset is locked to their proprietary wireless platform. Photo taken by the author.

Microsoft. They’re a big tech company. Depending on the day of the week and current share prices, maybe even the biggest! They produce Windows, one of the most ubiquitous operating systems and one of the largest-ever gaming platforms. If you want to get good game audio out of your Windows PC, you have so many options. You can plug stuff in to your motherboard’s built-in audio outputs. You can get a USB DAC. You can use a whole variety of gaming headsets that will be compatible either through a wire or a wireless dongle. And you can even use Bluetooth — as long as you don’t mind intense lag.

You’d think that some of this flexibility would extend over the Microsoft fence to the Xbox…but you’d be wrong. Xbox supports wired analog headsets through a headphone jack on the controller, but it’ll drain your AA batteries faster and there are limits to quality and amplification. You can pump audio out to your own receiver or TV through the HDMI port on the back, but then you’ll need to get a bunch of extra hardware for proper surround processing. The USB ports could have been key for audio-lovers — but Microsoft has those locked down with a weird licensing scheme.

Years ago, in the final days of the Xbox One, there was a little glimmer of audio hope. Microsoft pushed out the Windows Sonic platform for both…