Crap.
I was getting ready to buy the Medusa 5.1 and I stumbled across some info that makes me have second thoughts. Basically, if you do a little googling, you find that there is an argument going on between proponents of these new "5.1" headphones and the audio enthusiasts. The argument against 5.1headphones is that it is just a gimmick. Since the speakers are so close to eachother, you lose a lot of the intended effect of multichannel sound. Yes, it is true that you can identify which of the 3 (or 4) speakers the sound is coming from, but the audio enthusiasts argue that a much more accurate and consistent surround experience is delivered by standard good quality stereo headphones with the addition of sophisticated sound processing algorithms that are included with most soundcards. They argue that since we have only 2 ears, it is possible to manipulate the sounds very convincingly such that they appear to be coming from different directions. It all has to do with the accuratley simulating the way the sound waves bounce off your head and outer ear, it changes the way things sound and your brain translates it to what we perceive as locations. I'm a little unclear on the detail of how 2-speaker (or headphone) positional audio is implemented in games. Is it a DirectX standard that each sound card implements with their own branded technology (EAX, Sensuara, etc.)? Does the game itself mix the multichannel sound into 2 channels? However it works, the key thing is to get some kind of comparison between "5.1" headphones and 2-speaker headphone positional audio on comparable priced, but much higher quality normal headphones. I know I get a positional audio effect with my current $20 standard headphones, but I don't know if the 5.1 set would be better, or if a $50-$100 standard set would be better. When it comes to movies, Dolby has a similar tech known as "Dolby Headphone". I believe that it takes multichannel audio and does DSP processing on it do the same effective thing. For example, if you have a digital out coming out of your soundcard, you could send that to a receiver that supported Dolby Headphone and get a simlar result to having the soundcard itself do the processing. Not sure exactly how it compares to EAX, etc. though. Don't know what to do! The engineer in me tells me to go with the science and buy a nice pair of Grado SR-60 ($70) or Grado SR-80 ($95) headphones. It would work for games and if I had a receiver with Dolby Headphone, I could use them for gamecube and DVDs as well. I'd need the receiver anyway for console and DVD even WITH the 5.1 headphones. On the other hand, the subjective consumer in me wants to buy the gimmicky 5.1 headphones. :-(