Surround sound can be a tricky thing to emulate. Get it wrong and it messes with your sound perception and positioning when it comes to games. It could turn a really audible song into a cesspool of bass and omnidirectional noise. Get it right and you’ll never want to go back to the realm of mundane stereophonic sound. In this case, the Sennheiser GSX 1000 didn’t get it right, they got it perfect.
The GSX 1000 is Sennheiser’s newest toy for gamers in need of the extra boost a supreme listening experience can provide. In simple terms, it’s an external audio card – you plug it into your computer via a cable and you plug your headphones into it, instead of plugging them directly into the PC – a more complex description would include its design & audial capabilities, which I’ll get into.
Unplugged and by itself the Sennheiser GSX 1000 looks pretty tame. Measuring 100x100x27.5 mm and weighing around 300 grammes, the GSX 1000 doesn’t take up a lot of space and while it may not have the bits and bolts a professional studio’s mixer has, it certainly delivers when it comes to gaming. The biggest feature about the GSX 1000 is the aluminium volume ring that encloses the intuitive LED touch panel. The volume ring, whilst giving you the fleeting impression of a DJ’s turntable lets you quickly decrease or increase the volume; increasing the volume from zero to the max possible takes a little over a full rotation. It’s rotation based and not acceleration based so the angle you need to rotate the volume ring for the volume to change is fixed.
Before I talk about the LED panel, I should mention the four LED bars near the corners of the GSX 1000; each is actually a preset, tapping any of the four will load up a different preset. And the red LED lighting is absolutely amazing, giving a glow of power when you wave your hand above the entire device and set against the black panel and plastic, it gives you a crisp look of what your current audio settings are. It’s a fantastic looking device that’ll catch the eye of anyone walking past your desk.
Now, to the LED panel and the settings you can tinker with. The centre of the circular panel is the home of current volume level, a big red glowing number that dims after a few seconds of inactivity, but is still quite clearly visible. Activating the display instantly lights up six other settings you can change. In clockwise, from the one o’clock position they are: the equaliser, sound focus, surround sound toggle, sidetone level, reverb level and listening device. Each of the icons can be tapped to toggle their respective settings, easily letting you dynamically change your listening experience. And once you’ve fine-tuned your own settings, simply holding down of the four LED preset lights for a few seconds will result in an audible thump noise that lets you know the settings have been saved to that preset.
But how does the actual audial experience stack up?
The supreme listening experience the Sennheiser GSX 1000 offers can be chalked up to two things, the inbuilt DAC (digital to analogue converter) and Sennheiser’s Binaural Rendering Engine that gives you the Surround Sound 7.1 listening experience you’ll soon learn to love, even with affordable stereo headsets. That’s right, you can transform those cheap stereo headsets you once bought at a yard sale into surround sound headsets thanks to the 7.1 Virtual Surround Algorithm.
As a result, for open world games like Guild Wars 2, I cranked up the reverb to its full limit, selected the music preset from the equaliser to better hear the orchestral music in the game, neutralised the audio focus, activated the 7.1 surround sound and eliminated the sidetone so that the sound of my breathing didn’t overlay the surreal sound of the game. Simply saving all the settings to one of the four presets lets me quickly switch to those preferred settings with a simple tap.
Now, you have to remember that the Sennheiser GSX 1000 is, in the end, an amplifier and that while your listening experience can be greatly improved by connecting your headset to it, your final listening experience will depend on your headset. Unfortunately, the GSX 1000 does fall short in a few areas. For instance, you can only plug a headset with 3.5 mm headphone and microphone jacks; there are no USB ports. The same applies for speakers (there is a dedicated 3.55mm speaker port. Another would be the price, which I talk about below.
The verdict? I found the Sennheiser GSX 1000 to deliver a listening experience close to and in some cases the same as, a few surround sound headsets on the market. Furthermore, the fact that the amplifier provides more settings for you to fine tune than most headsets offer instantly puts it on my list of products to recommend to gamers. However, the price of AED 899 could be quite the deterrent for most gamers. You can find far more affordable headsets on the market such as the GSP 350, albeit they do come short in terms of fine tuning capability.
