Hopefully Catpain is just exaggerating to make his point. He's probably some sort of audiophile who turns his nose up at any equipment that costs less that £1000. The quality of the inbuilt headphones of my Rift are definitely better than the headset I was using, but then I was using Logitech headphones so I don't think that tells anyone reading this anything at all.
The case for the Oculus headphones has been made many times on this forum. They are fairly good quality. They have no dangling wires and so they make putting on your headset as easy as fitting a baseball cap. You don't have to insert anything in your ears. And because game makers know the vast majority of VR players aren't going to give themselves the hassle for that slight diminishing-return extra bit of sound quality, they know exactly what kind of headphones their customers are using and they can tailor their sounds for those headphones.
I consider myself a fair bit of an Audiophile or at least an AV geek.
But CATPAIN is also completely disregarding the physics and psychoacustics of audio.
Well that's also par for the course for most enthusiasts. And how the industry can sell $10000/m speaker cables.
Speakers depend on a sweetspot and for most average living rooms that spot is maybe at most 50cm in all six directions.
And the major tenant in audio and especially surround sound setups is calibration. Calibration calibration and more calibration. Of course after position position position.
You move your ears half a meter up or down and you will move in and out of various standing waves especially for bass response, this could be as much as 20db! difference between one listener position and another at certain frequencies.
I have personally been in homes with equipment as expensive as the house and the difference between one seat and another is audio nirvana and just hell.
Even if you had 7+ absolutely identical speakers plus an array of subwoofers it would be impossible to get decent frequency response over the entire room unless you did some major software processing voodoo using 3d positional tracking.
Technically possible to do this with vr but would be a very lengthy calibration process, insanely expensive to actually develop and purchase for the end user and it still will be less flexible than a pair of cans both for vr and in regards to fidelity, albeit they can't do tactile bass like a subwoofer array.
One problem so far is neither oculus or vive has given much care to audio, I honestly suspect they are having driver issues and I suspect the chief issue is from the windows hdmi audio driver that has a hard coded crossover at 80hz range settings, when you run audio out hdmi it is mostly to an av receiver, if you then don't have a sub it pushes that lfe back into the front speakers and it sounds a bit like at least the vive doesn't do that.
The rift might be using usb for audio, but it's kind of hard to tell since the on set headphones distort rather badly in the low end.
But my point is by EVERY consideration headsets are the best choice for VR.
If you think a stereo headset can't do positionall give this a listen using regular stereo cans, earplugs whatever you have.
[video=youtube;IUDTlvagjJA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUDTlvagjJA[/video]
Any speaker setup would do fine if you are in a very limited seated sim type VR, like ED. If that is the only thing you do with an HMD then speakers will do better audio than cans.
But I don't consider that or the rift really as real VR anymore, it's playing games with a stereo HMD nothing more, it's a brilliant way to play but to me VR = room play.
Discussion done.
Personally I don't bother too hard with pc-audio you can only squeeze so much blood from a stone. I use my PC for gaming mostly and most game audio is just rendered from compressed to death assets anyways, using external "HiFi" dac's etc to output audio is also really not that good an idea considering latency issues, you kind of want to hear that audio cue on cue and not 400ms later.
So on the PC I play with regular cans and I do use the actually headphones supplied on the rift cause why not, they are practical and on par with pretty much any other gaming set of cans most games are designed to anyways.