Engineered For The Win
To perform at your best, you need the technology to match your skills as you take up the challenge. EPOS has a unique approach to designing audio equipment for the competitive gamer that has its roots in the laboratory but delivers results that speak for themselves in esports arenas around the world. We call it: EPOS BrainAdapt™ technology.
At the crucial moment in a ranked game – when the match hinges on your concentration, reflexes and situational awareness – you need all the support you can get to gain that crucial competitive edge. Your gaming audio needs to help you stay focused, communicate seamlessly with your team, and make the right in-game decisions.
As you’d expect, using equipment which is well engineered and manufactured is important. But did you know that the key to unlocking your best performance is buried deep in your brain?
At EPOS, we have spent over a decade of research examining how to improve your brain’s listening capabilities with an approach we call EPOS BrainAdapt™. We now know that our brain processes audio in three stages – “orient”, where we determine the direction from which the sound has come, “focus”, to separate out the important sound from background noise, and finally “recognize”, the process of interpreting the sounds we’re actively listening to.
Competitive gamers need their audio equipment to support their brains at each of these three steps. Directional audio cues need to be clear and precise, so we know balancing the volume in each ear precisely depending on the player’s facing in game is vital. If the levels are unbalanced, the brain will need to work overtime interpreting inaccurate audio cues.
Even more significantly, competitive gamers need to be able to hear the sound cues that are most important – like player footsteps – with absolute clarity and natural sounding timbre. The quicker the player’s brain orients, focuses and interprets the sound it hears, the faster the player’s reaction times will be and the better their performance.
In the heat of battle, the brain needs to be able to focus effortlessly on team communication – never straining to hear who is speaking, or what they are saying. EPOS uses high quality microphones, positioned optimally, and tuned to capture each team member’s unique voiceprint accurately and clearly. The more natural your team-mates’ voices, the lower the load on your brain – just as it would be if you were talking in the same room together.
The more time we spend with esports teams, the better we get to know their needs and the more we learn about how to support their gaming performance. For example, it’s not just in the match environment that athletes need assistance but at the training camp too. Practicing for long hours is tiring, and artificial-sounding, blurred audio is one of the main causes of listening fatigue. When trying to focus, anything the brain is finding difficult to process subconsciously requires additional effort. Over several hours of practice or in a long day at an event, this can add considerably to the player’s overall level of brain fatigue, leading to miscommunication, poor decision making and slower reaction times.