Why do all these "gaming" wireless headsets have USB connections, as opposed to optical or digital?
WTH am I missing?
USB is digital.
Optical is digital.
Digital is digital, it doesn't matter which is used from a sound quality or feature perspective, When you are using your sound card's digital port, you are bypassing your sound card. Any adjustment to the sound is being done by the computer in sofware. The sound card is just passing the digital signal from the operating system to the optical port. At this point your sound card has become the functional equivalent of an expensive wire that also consumes power. A wire that is 100% functionally equivalent to using the built-in USB port or SPDIF port on your motherboard. That is why every wireless headset uses USB, because every computer has a USB port, and not every computer has an optical or coax SPDIF port.
YEARS ago, there was a bunch of different proprietary softwares for positional audio that was tied to specific brands of soundcards. Those sound cards processed the digital signal with their proprietary software on a dedicared sound chip before converting to analog. Also digital to analog conversion was not a simple thing done by a tiny inexpensive chip.
But now, now all these positional softwares have merged into either DirectX and happen as a part of Windows, or they are incorporated into the game engine and done by the game, and the game pays a small royalty. All the positional audio happens in sofware, digitally, by the CPU before it gets passed to the soundcard. This is possible because CPUs and games are multi-threaded and can handle that kind of thing very easily with much, much less penalty than when sound cards were relevant to gaming. If someone has convinced you that sound cards are still relevant for positional audio in games, that your sound card is ANYTHING other than a glorified DAC and amplifier, they are wrong. Sound cards are still useful for music processing. Making music, accessing and modifying the digital music stream, providing more or different output jacks than standard. But for gamers using a headset or standard 2.1 setup, they are no longer relevant at all. An external DAC + AMP is more flexible and (usually) superior.
As a result, now one of the best gaming setups is to just get a good COMFORTABLE headphone that uses a standard 3.5mm connector (I use Philips SHP9500) and run an external DAC / AMP like a FiiO or SMSL or Schiit (or if you're crazy about this kind of thing and spend lots of money, an OPPO or whatever floats your boat), hook it up to the USB or optical out and use a V-moda boom-pro to get a mic. Now you have great headphones for music or games or whatever... you can actually use open headphones which tend to have much better imaging and are good for positional audio, but for some reason nobody makes an out of the box open headphone gaming headset... and since you're smart, you choose a DAC / AMP with a volume knob, and you can reach over and adjust the volume easily without having to enter game options or hit some strange combo of keys to adjust the volume whenever you want (I just love my knob, okay... maybe it's not healthy, but I love my knob.)
Also, for those who don't know, you can compensate for a headset's weakneeses with an equalizer program (Equalizer APO, for example) which will EQ everything (Music, Youtube, games,etc...) I use it to bump the bass region of my SHP9500s a couple dB. They don't have huge extension in that area, but a small tweak goes a long way. It improves the gaming aspect of the headphones without giving the overdone bloated bass that many headsets build into their frequency response.