Razer Surround seems most noticeable when you simply listen to music on the desktop. If you play with a gaming headset that has a mic attached, Surround lets you adjust the volume level of in-game voice communication and fiddle with a “presence level” setting that supposedly clarifies incoming voice messages with a special audio filter. In my tests Razer Surround worked well with a pair of Sony MDR-V6 stereo headphones, breathing life into the crowd scenes of Metro: Last Light by making it sound as though different conversations grew louder or softer as I rotated my character’s head and moved through the tunnels. The calibration process itself is a little confusing: You have to look at a diagram of where a given sound effect is meant to emanate from, and then close your eyes and adjust the effect’s positioning with your mouse wheel until it sounds like it’s coming from the correct spot.Ĭalibrating the 7 quadrants of this virtual 7.1 surround-sound arrangement is simple enough: Look at where the audio is supposed to be originating, and then adjust the settings until the sound seems to come from that location.Īfter completing the calibration process, you can run through a few demos to verify that you’re now simulating decent surround sound in your two-bit stereo headset. Click that entry, and you’ll run through a simple calibration process that lets you tailor the positioning of the emulated surround sound to your preferences. Log in to Synapse, and ‘Razer Surround’ should appear on the list of Razer peripherals attached to your PC.

Razer Surround is a virtual sound card that you can customize via the Razer Synapse software. When you finish installing Razer Surround on your PC, the software creates a virtual sound card (called the Razer Surround Audio Controller) that accepts surround-sound data from whatever is running on your PC-games, movies, or music-and emulates it virtually on a pair of stereo headphones. Razer Surround works through Razer’s Synapse 2.0 utility, so you’ll have to register for a Razer account and download the requisite software before getting started.

Razer synapse eq settings