Channel your inner Professor X by turning your gaming chair into Cerebro with this strap-on 7.1.2 surround sound speaker
Ten years ago, my gaming setup didn't look massively different to what I have now, with one noticeable difference—while I always use a headset now, back then I had a massive 5.1 speaker system. Such setups are no longer very popular but one audio company reckons it has just thing to bring them back to the fore: Cerebro. Wait, sorry—the Colo GCS by Cololight.
What Cololight has done is take 11 speakers to create a 7.1.2 audio landscape (seven primary channels, one low-frequency channel, and two 'overhead' channels), but rather than have them dotted around your gaming room, it's placed them in a large U-shaped ring that straps onto your gaming chair's headrest.
To be honest, mere words aren't enough to describe how astonishing the thing looks, and I can't quite decide if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Let's start by considering the aspects of it that make it seem good.
Cololight lists a variety of reasons why its design is better than headsets and soundbars, such as comfort, space requirements, and the fact that such setups only simulate surround sound. They're all valid complaints but the right gaming headset will be comfortable for hours of use and soundbars, even those with sub-woofers, aren't especially massive.
The point about simulating surround sound has become far less relevant these days, as most gamers will be more than happy with what a stereo headset can generate. A true surround sound system does...err…sound epic, though.
It'd be quite unfair to judge something negatively without trying it first, but a couple of things do stand out for me. The first, and most obvious, is that the whole system is pretty close to your head so it makes me wonder how frequently one is likely to bounce one's bonce off it, just from getting up from the chair.
This leads to my second concern: how stable and strong the attachment system is. Basically, the whole thing straps to a chair's headrest, and the Colo GCS has been specifically designed to work on e-sports/gaming
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