Dialog Plus does indeed bring forward the dialogue in games--which is useful at low volumes--but it also distorts the midrange of music and sound effects. I left it off. Smart Volume is a sound auto-leveling feature that brings up quiet sounds and brings down the loud noises to make everything a little more "even." It's amazing the little details you can hear in some games with this setting enabled, and it can be very useful when you're chatting on or with your gamer friends. Voices often come in at wildly different volumes, and Smart Volume can really help even them out. On the other hand, it doesn't deal well with games that have lots of persistent background music, and it destroys the dynamic range of music with lots of soft and loud parts (such as classical music). In the end, I enabled Smart Volume with a hotkey when playing a game with voice chat, adjusting the strength to 50 percent; I left it disabled the rest of the time.
The audio-processing feature that gamers will be the most interested in is the Surround function, which is THX's answer to . It takes 3D positional audio (5.1 or 7.1) and attempts to give you the same sense of location and depth using a stereo headset that you would get with a huge set of speakers. It even tries to one-up Dolby Headphone by adding height information to make sounds seem to come from above or below you.
In my experience, Surround only sort-of works. Certainly the sound field is expanded greatly, and unlike many other faux-surround technologies it doesn't make everything simply sound like you're in an echoey bathroom. I still think Dolby Headphone does a better job of providing an obvious and accurate sense of location than THX's version does, and I didn't get a really clear sense of vertical location out of this headset. Even after fiddling with the strength of the Surround feature, I left it turned on with most games but turned off for listening to music. This is more than I can say for nearly any other faux-surround technology, though, and it still comes a very close second to a good Dolby Headphone implementation.
Lots of World of Warcraft players are on Macs, and they'll be thrilled to know that Creative's official WoW headset is fully Mac compatible, with the same configuration software and features, right out of the box. And if you really can't stand the WoW look but you still want this headset, stay tuned: We hear that Creative will eventually make a version without the WoW theme.
Until now, my favorite headset, hands-down, has been the amazingly good (and expensive) Astro A40 Audio System. These days, I'm torn. Both the A40 and Creative's WoW headset sound fantastic and have great design and features. For PC gaming, I think the lack of a cord and a separate headphone mixer makes the WoW wireless headset more convenient by far, and the excellent configuration software is a feather in Creative's cap. The A40's open-air design makes it a bit more comfortable for very long gaming sessions, and the hardware amp lets you plug in your game console for excellent "private gaming" in the living room.