Did you see how I just slayed the oxford comma there?

Anyways. How did this not come up on the forums. We've talked Astros, we've talked Turtle Beaches, we've worshipped at the feet of Sennheiser, and yet we haven't pointed out this one amazing thing that Microsoft has had available for the past 3 months!

Dolby Atmos For Headphones is available through Dolby Access (30 day free-trial, $15 to buy)

But what does that mean?

First lets discuss Dolby Surround and Dolby Atmos
Well, back in the day, what made Astro the best set of cans in the gaming headphones market was that they licensed and packaged in their headphone amplifier (the mixamp) Dolby Surround for Headphones. This meant that they could take a 5.1 (at the time) feed and turn it into virtualized surround sound with a pair of headphones. The science behind it is pretty cool, but I guess the easiest way to point out that you can get virtualized surround sound with headphones is that you have 2 ears, so jamming 2 speakers right next to them and simulating how sounds sound differently from different directions actually works!

So Dolby Atmos is a dolby surround codec that can handle 128 audio streams output through 64 possible positioned speakers. Each sound can have a 3D position and it will translate that to whatever position the speaker is in, so you could have a set up that doesn't just handle in front, right, left and back, but above and below! Dolby Atmos for Headphones just boils that fully 3D audio down for headphone listening.

But what does that really mean?

Any headphones you have hooked up to your XB1, through the controller, through a mixamp, WHATEVER, can have virtualized fully 3D audio

Make sure if you have Astros or TBs or some other "surround sound" headphones, that you turn off their surround sound processing (you definitely can with Astros) as you really don't want them re-processing the sound. And from my initial tests, yes the Atmos processing is better than the amp processing, also as games (like Gears Of War 4) add support, this will be the way to get that full 3D chunky audio!

This is huge because it means you DO NOT need a mixamp or some other amp to do the surround sound. It means you can focus on buying headphones that you like and just use those, plugged into your controller.

And if you still want volume, chat, and balance controls, why not check out Astro's Mixamp M80?

Cheers!