Using headphones and X-Fi: Which setting to choose in games, Surround or Headphon

Question

I have X-Fi Platinum. In the Audio Console/Console Launcher, I can choose between <i>Headphones</i>, <i>5. Speakers</i> and some other setups, though these two are the only ones apliccable to me. When I connect my headphones, the settings are automatically adjusted to <i>Headphones</i>.
What I'm wondering about is what to choose in the games I play. Should I choose headphone settings there (or "Stereo", if that's the only stereo choice)? As far as I've gathered, the X-Fi can (to some extent) give 3D-sound in headphones by using CMSS-3D (if I've understood correctly), and I expect that for this to work, a 5.-source must be present (which it isn't if the settings in the game are set to Stereo or Headphones or whatever).
So, what do I choose in the games? Surround/5. or Stereo/Headphones?
I've also read at the X-Fi site that games with OpenAL (at least Prey) send the sounds to the sound card along with all the positional information, in which case the sound card does everything depending on the speaker setup in the drivers:
<i>Because audio is not fixed into a speaker configuration until the final playback stage, Prey audio played through the OpenAL API can be virtualized to surround sound in a far more meaningful way. The audio reaching the card from the game is deli'vered with all its positional information intact thereby allowing the headphone or stereo speaker virtualization algorithms to produce highly convincing surround sound over stereo playback equipment.</i>
This would also explain why Prey doesn't have a choice between stereo or surround when using OpenAL. How is this done in other OpenAL games? Are there never any speaker setup settings in OpenAL games?

Answer 1

I think you'll find that PC games pretty much use either DirectSound3D or OpenAL in cases like these and they leave handling the speaker configuration to them. When I've looked into a small number of examples where the game had speaker-configuration settings, all it seemed to do was set the Windows speaker configuration, and had nothing to do with audio handling by the game itself.
In such cases, what you really want to be able to do is to set your speaker settings up before you launch the game, and just have the game use them as is. You don't want the game changing that, and having such settings within the game just seems an opportunity for the game's programming to aggressi'vely step on your settings. You don't want to start a game with Headphones set, then suspend the game to look as your speaker settings, and find you're set to 2 speakers!
The SBX-Fi pays attention to the speaker-configuration settings in CL's controls. I think there's an option to synchronize with the Windows speaker-configuration controls (there has been for prior cards at least), and this situation seems a good reason to not enable the synchronization.
DirectSound on Vista has issues for CL cards because Microsoft removed the hooks which allowed CL to provide hardware acceleration. OpenAL doesn't have this problem, and CL's ALchemy provides a bridge to translate a game's DirectSound calls to OpenAL equivalents.
You should choose Headphones, and hope you don't have to fiddle with the game's settings.
-Dave
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