TL;DR: Superb sound spacialization through your headphones. Full home theatre experience, even when your household is asleep. Responsive devs. Very inexpensive. I love it - huge recommend!

Update 13/Apr/16: Now that I've racked up 160+ hours of usage (which will continue to climb for the foreseeable future), I want to add a quick addendum to my full review below to state straightaway that I've found Spatial Sound Card (SSC) to be nothing short of transformative to my audio experience on PC, and I now use it every day in my short list of "essential" software, with games, films, and music. Once properly set up and paired with quality headphones, and while being fed with good quality audio (not all audio sources are made equal!), the three-dimensional soundstage created by SSC is phenomenal (even with stereo sources, it sounds like you are in a balanced studio with freestanding stereo speakers rather than enclosed in your headphones). Frankly, I was too cautious in my optimism in my initial review, which was only based on ~10 hours of use. In addition, the development team has proven to be responsive, communicative, and willing to incorporate user feedback into their updates. My main criticism, lack of proper documentation, should be resolved any day now according to the devs. At this price, it's an absolute no-brainer - pick it up and try it out. The best surround video game audio I've experienced so far with SSC is Mad Max in 5.1 surround mode, with the SSC "Shanghai" studio preset and the LFE (low frequency effects) turned down a bit to eliminate distortion (depends on your headphones)... the roaring V8 car battles and getting caught in a raging sandstorm make me reminisce of the first time I ever experienced a cranked up 5.1 Dolby loudspeaker system many years ago. The fact that I can experience this late at night with my wife sleeping undisturbed mere feet away makes me very happy indeed. :)

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Original Review:

Warning: Your Mileage May Vary. My results, though, were impressive!

I can see why, at this point, there are a number of negative reviews. It's not at all apparent how to set it up properly, I can't find any documentation whatsoever, the various presets give no description as to what they actually do, there are no test sounds built into the program to identify how your settings affect the output and, finally, I imagine the end result may highly depend on your headphones. I really hope the devs correct these aspects, because many users will understandably become lost and go for a refund. But then they'd miss out on what this software can do, and that'd be a shame, because this is a unique little gem.

So I opened with the negatives, but what about the positives, which I feel won out? Well, I've persisted with this software past the point of no refunds, and I've finally gotten it setup properly (I think), and the net result is that *the soundscape being played through my headphones sounds much more 3-dimensional than it did without this software*. In fact, my headphones sound more "surround" than they've ever done (in 16 years!), apart from when listening to binaural recordings. In the end, it actually does what it says on the tin, provided you can get it working.

First, my hardware setup is almost custom-tailored for good results with this program. My headphones are a very loved set of Sennheiser HD600s paired with a small Headroom headphone amplifier plugged directly into the "Line Out" (not headphone jack!) of my (meh) Realtek onboard soundcard (Windows 7 64 OS). Straight away, I experienced the "garbled sound" effect that many have complained of. On my system, as with most I assume, I had to manually select my audio output device and make sure it was in WASAPI mode. If you don't know your WASAPI from your ASIO, then maybe you didn't take audio engineering courses in university like I did... and that's why some documentation would be useful! Anyhow... this fixed my garbled sound issue. Next, I chose a preset... I have no idea what the difference between the different "city" themes are yet, but I've settled on "Dubai" for the present, chose the EQ preset for Sennheiser HD600s (very handy if you have a pair of the headphones with built-in eq presets), and then lowered the LFE (low frequency effects) knob by a fair bit (numeric values would be more useful than a knob) because the default LFE was creating audio distortion in my headphone amp.

I've tried two games with excellent surround sound to properly test everything: Portal 2 and Alien: Isolation. And the litmus test was that I could walk into an area with a clear directional sound source, close my eyes, and tell more-or-less exactly where it was at as I walked around in-game. It was much better than the built-in positional audio from the standard "headphones" audio settings of the games. And in the end, that's what counts.

Also, I spent ~£5 for this software on sale, so I think it's important to maintain a little perspective. I'm definitely going to get my fiver's worth out of it. Heck, I'd pay that just to experiment with this software and encourage developers in trying to make cool audio tech. This wasn't a snap to setup and use, and I doubt it'd be all that great with poor headphones, so you'll have to weigh your own circumstances up when considering the purchase: do you have good headphones, and are you willing to tweak and experiment to dial in your settings? If so, I reckon this gives pretty impressive results.

If you have good sources, this software is nothing short of incredible. It takes surround input and gives you realistic headphone stereo.
This isn't like the other headphone-surround tools I have used (Razer, etc), which produce an overly clinical sound. SSC uses room virtualization to make the sound echo from one speaker around the room, which takes the realism to a much higher level.

I have primarily tested this with Rainbow Six Siege and Mad Max. In R6 this has allowed me to quite accurately kill people through walls based on sound positioning. That is how good this really is.

SSC does have some technical issues for me, namely the sound 'popping.' This gets less significant over time, but it sounds really bad when testing immediatly after launching the program. In the five minutes it takes to actually get ingame the pops generally recede to an ignorable level.

I bought his software since i wanted to add some virtual surround options to my Audio Technica ATH-M40X Headphones. Nice interface but horribe.garbled mess coming out of my Headphones. No matter if outputting through my USB - soundcards or onboard sound the results remain the same. Static, noise. whatever you want to call it. First time i refunded something on steam

**Update**
The developer was so nice as to send me a new code for review/testing.

Locking SSC to all Wasapi definitely solved the garbling problems when using my onboard sound, so for all you onboard-users you might want to have another look at this Software.
Better surround-soundstage and overall quality than Dolby Home Theater 4 or Dolby Headphone.
The other Comparison would be Razer Surround Pro which sounds more directly on-ear and is a little cleaner when it comes to positional audio. SSC is more of a movie / music listening solution, so don't expect it to do gaming audio like a software optimized for it.

Unfortunately the chopped up audio persists when using my USB Audio interfaces and since those are where the really good sound comes from in my setup, i'm still not going to use SSC right now. I will give it more tries if the dev continues to work on it and i can use my "real" soundcards.

If you are an onboard-sound user and you can get past the user interface (definitely needs some documentation or hover-overs) SSC can definitely give you a nice listening experience.

At it's current stage i can't give a recommendation but i'm seeing potential here and will continue to update my review

Recommended? (AKA tl;dr)

IMHO a great alternative to most cheap HRTF-solutions for gamers.
I tested the PRO-Version (hence the very short review-time!), yet the steam-version does basically the same core-feature wise. I really like it and don't wanna miss it anymore.

Do you need it or want it? Well, do you often use a headphone but would like 3D-surround-sound? Wanna know if your enemy is coming from behind you or is in front of you?
If yes, give it a go! Most soundcard-producers currently have their own HRTF-options available, but honestly they're just okay-ish.
My personal ranking in terms of the ability of precise position would be:

1. SSC
2. Creative Labs
3. Dolby Headphone
4. ...Others

If you happen to have a headset which is amongst the tiny selection of pre-set headphone-EQs then you're easily set. If not you will be able to just
ignore the setting or tweak your phones manually. But that assumes you already know how it SHOULD naturally sound like, which probably is kinda unlikely.
But if you don't really care for total precision and accuracy but more about personally felt "better sound" then just do whatever you want until it suits your ears :)


The good (what to love):

• Excellent 3D-Positioning
  
• Great headphone-surround
  
• Volume-Boost if needed
  
• Latency-settings (5.3/10.7/21.3ms)
  
• Headphone EQs to adapt sound to your cans
  
• Nice presets and enough settings to tweak the room to your liking
  
• Sleek interface, no bells and whistles (hence no blown-up crap) just the essential stuff

The mediocre (neither good nor bad, or simply not objectively either):

• No "no-preset-at-all" feature where you maybe just only select your cans to be good
  
• Could use some more tweaks maybe, for nerds u know? :-)
  
• Some testing-vid/sound is missing. Or some form of 3D-Testing-ability

The ugly (what to hate, may kill the fun):

• Missing a global bypass-option. You have to select another soundcard as a default if you wanna temporarily bypass SSC. Which would most likely kill every app that is currently using it. Please add!
  
  (Sorry, Option is there, just not made overly clear. "Disable Headphone-Surround" actually does this)
  
• Too few headphone-EQs. Though some major players are listed (Even Monsters...ugh, seriously, why?), many are missing. Hope they will be added in future...
  
  (Sorry too. More cans will be added in the next releases)

Ok so i dont usually write reviews even though i probably should. I have over 1600 hours with this program. I use it pretty much every day and every time i start up my computer. Lets get some of the positives down first.

Its 10 dollars
Its better than onboard sound for im guessing any motherboard.
It works well with my logitech Z 506 setup.
It plays sound through my dedicated sound card which im not sure how but i dont need to plug anything into the onboard ports.
It has a lot of options.
It does an amazing job of giving you a sound stage you can use in either gaming or just listening to music.
You can set for stereo, 5.1, 6.1 or 7.1 surround sound.
You have many headphones to choose from even if you dont have them you can use their sound stage. The short medium and long section is a little strange but it sets the general punchyness of the sound. So with low its more flat and with long its more drawn out in the sound. (best way i can describe it)
The sound stages are awesome and give you a good feel of where everything is when gaming.


On to two negatives so far. 1 There is no start up when computer starts up option because you have to start it up through steam. I would love to get a free upgrade where i can have it as a program that does the exact same thing but can set to start up when my computer starts up. Not a huge problem i am just saying it would be nice to have.
Second negative is that its always on top when you open it. So if you have steam open and you have the program open its gonna be over steam and may block some stuff so make sure to minimize it.

Those are just some small things that arent a big deal but i figure they are worth mentioning. I really really enjoy using this product and I look forward to playing more of the games i have in the future. It works really well with FPS games where the sound is always changing or if you have games with lots of explosions. BF1, COD (which i dont play), CSS, CSGO (which i dont play). I have over 400 games so i cant list all of them that this product is awesome with but it works well with music or gaming. Thanks for reading.

Price is right.

If you are receiving stuttering in the sound as you first start it, you need to configure your audio device settings correct. You need to make sure you are using WASAPI instead of ASIO, if I am not entirely mistaken. Also I had to configure my headphones from playback devices to use 7.1 audio instead of stereo. (Here audio experts see I have no idea what I am talking about).

Any how, I hate tinkering with equalizer when it comes to finding the right one for games, I use it for CS GO and found that SHANGHAI setting with little tinkering to Steelseries, Siberia ELite prism equalizer worked for me. I lowered slightly the lower and higher end knobs and increased slighty the 125, 250 and 500 values.

I suppose I would include more documentation to the settings, but otherwise it's a small money for nice program.

Has potential but I have no use for it because of all the noise crackling/crackin it gives me.
Tried the latency options, none worked on the surround settings (tested all of them).

The only thing that properly worked (well somewhat tbh) was stereo + the fps latency setting without giving me sound cracks.

I am using a Beyerdynamic DT 770 on a Sound blaster omni 5.1 external soundcard.
Tried running it without any of the other soundsoftwares (onboard, external soundcard etc.) but same results.
Even running it through the onboard soundcard didnt make a change.

I also tried setting up the virtual soundcard/speakers/headphones using the windows device management/installation always picking the corresponding options ( selecting a 5.1 surround sound in SSC and in the device installation) without any changes.

It does not create virtual surround sound for me either, only right and left (lol) despite selecting them as surround (assuming thats what the S stands for) but none of the channels it creates work.
And in stereo its way too quiet too, so that i have to crank the audio up or increase the volume on the channels.


The only thing that worked was Stereo in New York on default room parameters using the Beyerdynamic dt 770 Equalizer option. It did sound good and i will test and play around more with the software, but i can't recommend it to anybody.

Chances are it wont be as messy as on my system and run smooth on yours, but thats something you have to find out for yourself.

To make things easier i reccommend the Dev to upload a Demo for everyone to try without having to go through the refund process when it doesn't run as intended.


update: It does now have working channels, but still tons of cracking when sound is played. However it is hard to tell if its really working surround sound because it sounds like under water.

Update: The software and all its drivers do not work any longer, it keeps crashing on start and both reinstallation of driver and software did nothing. All i did was to deactivate devices that had nothing to do with the actual software or the device i use! Even after reactivating the idle devices it didnt want to start any longer.

Update: Get Razer Surround demo instead of this, packs a lot more power into your system than any of this Early access software.

Razer Surround also works TOGETHER with all other drivers, got some nice beefy bass and rich sound because it cooperated with my Sound blaster omni soundcard!
It also has a pro version wich i am really considering to get, its 14,99€ wich is 3 times as much as i paid for this on BundleStars, but the demo doesn't fail to deliver! :D

Spatial Sound Card is the perfect fit with Player Unknown Battlegrounds. All of my squad mates are using it and I continue to recommend it to anyone who enjoys Battle Royal type games. One of the best damn purchases I've ever made on Steam <3

I'm not an audiophile and I can't really give a detailed description on how this software improves the audio quality of my sennheiser PX 100 headphones. I'm using H81MHV3 onboard soundcard for audio output leaving out the realtek software on default.

I've used the SSC Pro trial[www.newaudiotechnology.com] from their website for about three months. I got used to how music was so much better with it, though I only have stereo mp3 and FLAC; I can only say that I like what I hear so I ended up purchasing it when summer sale came.

The software does not upmix stereo sounds into 5.1 or 7.1. If you want to use surround sound settings on a game/movie/music, you should see to it that the source's sound output is set to 5.1 or 7.1. I've been using SSC to output Dota 2 virtual 5.1 surround sound for my stereo headphones for some time now and the difference is really noticeable. I've also tried it for movies with 3F2R/LFE(5.1) audio channel; I've mostly experimented with isolating L R C LFE LS RS speaker sounds and can confirm that it works.

I've encountered some issue while gaming and using it along with a VoIP service(discord) but they do have a solution for it in the community hub. For a demo, you can always download SSC Pro trial from New Audio Technology[www.newaudiotechnology.com], install it and hear the difference.

Amazing qualtiy. I highly recommend to anyone who plays FPS games.
Still not compatible out of the box with usb headsets.