Platinum Wireless Headset Launching January 12

You seem to have a fundamental misconception of what 3D audio is. It has nothing to do with head tracking; it’s about rendering positional audio so that your ears receive distinct cues about the exact location of all the sounds, relative to the game’s camera. This has nothing to do with your head position in real life in a non-VR game. There are many binaural audio cues necessary to accurately represent 3D audio, including ear time of arrival, head diffraction, and pinna filtering. Previous 5.1/7.1 headphones can only do some of this processing, because their inputs are planar (2D) in nature. Therefore, the basic HRTF filtering used in prior headsets cannot represent sounds that are “up” or “down” in any sense. The Platinum is the first self-contained headset that has DSP capability built-in that can be fed positional, object-based audio comprising a full 3D sphere, and then represent that spherical audio stream accurately, with all the binaural cues intact. This is a completely different way of rendering headset audio, and so no, this technique cannot be simply applied to other headsets.

This isn’t using the optical output. It uses a USB wireless dongle. Both 7.1 and 3D audio work in wireless mode over the USB dongle for non-VR games. The VSS and 3D audio processing happens in a DSP inside the dongle, just like previous wireless headsets.

There are no bass inducers on the Platinum. It has 50mm drivers (see Sony’s specs), which are large enough to provide considerable bass extension relative to smaller drivers (i.e., they can move more air because of increased surface area). For comparison, the previous Gold headset had 40mm drivers.

I explain all this above in detail in my reply to akibake. In short, 3D audio has nothing to do with head tracking; it’s all about rendering 3D spherical audio with accurate binaural cues. It is absolutely different from 7.1, which is only rendered in a 2D plane with no height or depth. I have heard the Platinum headset myself firsthand and I can confirm the 3D mode does not sound anything like 7.1 mode (though the headset supports both modes). Once you’ve heard it, you’ll understand the difference. :)

There is no 3.5mm input jack on the dongle. Wireless mode can only be used via USB audio with the dongle plugged into a PS3, PS4 or PC (the 3D audio feature only applies to PS4). It’s roughly the same size as the dongle for the Gold headset, just slightly thicker.

The presets are made by the game’s developer. If you want to see a specific preset, you should communicate that to the developer of the game you want a preset for, not Sony.