Do you have any experience for using those other product like Creative or Sennheiser
I have...plenty, long time user Creative Soundblaster, currently I own a Sound BlasterX G6. I use GSX1000 on my laptop.
Sennheiser in particular, I worked with a research team for its hearing aid division, long time ago. Consumer wise, I'm familiar with its gaming offerings.
Actually I have not really get the point about the different between Mixamp and Gaming Dac
MixAmp is a gaming DAC, pretty good one, with many attractive features like:
+ Chat and Gaming Audio Mix
+ Dolby Digital Surround support
+ A small parametric Equalizer, which is pretty helpful to tweak how your headphones sounds to make more audible some frequencies like footsteps. That was the original idea of this thread to share this EQ profiles for many headphones, because the A40 that came with MixAmp are pretty bad.
A DAC (Digital to Analog Converter) is an device that Converts Digital signal (101001 binary) to Analog Signal (Sound waves). For audio, the quality and performance of a DAC is represented on how accurate, resolving and recreates sound.
Every device on your life, with a Audio plug as a DAC. When is a very basic DAC(like the one where you plug your headset to the controller) the sound that produces feels very crowded, and inside in your head, audio frequencies are all mess and mix together, some absent, that's why you struggle to hear footsteps.
Some gaming DAC has "footsteps detection" or "game sense feature" which is a gizmo to highlight and make louder those frequencies, is handy and maybe all you need,
but if your headset is pretty bad, by its own, to reproduce those frequencies it won't make a big difference. So a decent headphone is pretty important, i will say it comes first, then a decent DAC.
Most gaming headphones/headsets like Logitech G331, are design to sound very bass heavy and soft treble, is called V shape, unfortunately the frequencies where the footsteps are, are in the dip of the V, you can't hear them properly they got veil by a boomy low end or harsh artificial treble.
High-end and pricey gaming headphones, are better to separate those frequencies, so you can distinguish where your friendlies are, where the enemies are coming from, explosions, enemy reloading around a corner, walking ontop of your position, etc. for above $299 usd you get that performance... or get something
even better that was specifically design to hear every sound detail, an audio studio headphone for only $60
And that's why we keep encouraging everybody to get better headphones, hi-fi, studio grade or audiophile over gaming offerings, a very few are pretty good and guess why? because they are audiophile headphones rebranded as a gaming ones, audiophile pedigree.
So, get better headphones. My go-to suggestion:
Philips SHP9500 -
Link $80 usd
Get a V-Moda Boom mic $20 to turn it on a headset.
For $100 you are getting a headset that sounds better than a most gaming headset around $200, and a fantastic headphone for music on the go.
I can't not recommend any DAC up to this point, because it won't make any money-worth difference on your G331.
But I can guarantee you the SHP9500, worth every single penny and it will give you an edge to hearing footsteps and enemies positioning.
Then... once you can/want, get a decent Hi-Fi DAC and its sound performance will be unleashed, even better, because this cans scale... better audio equiptment, more detail and resolving they are, like increasing screen resolution.
