Roccat Kave xtd 5.1 digital or analog?

No such thing as a "real 5.1 headset", you have just two ears and both are listening to independent sounds. ALL headphones by the nature of being headphones are two channel, though they can virtualize sound by mixing left and right channels and adding a bit of lag to each to simulate how sounds would if you had dependent audio sources like speakers in a room. Most games actually do virtualization in-engine too, and it works very well.

Regardless of what nonsense you have read online at gaming sites, you are 100% better off with good headphones than with "5.1/7.1 gamer" ones. Since you are already looking at ~$170 headsets, check out the http/www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1062932-REG/sennheiser_506080_g4me_one_headset_black.html as well.

That's like asking if you need to buy premium unleaded or only plus for a pinto... Anything on the market will be better than those headphones can handle, so don't bother spending a single extra cent on improving quality ("positional").


And for everything else you said, the root cause is poor configuration parameters on your end. If you don't configure the 5.1 system properly, you'll have just as bad of "positional audio" as before. Like with anything else, configuration should be your first step.

Actually the Roccat Kave analogue headphones have three drivers in each earcup and plug into the souncard with three 3.5mm TRS plugs and are true 6 channel .

Seems you also don't get the point. Because these are headphones, you effectively have only two channels, since you have two ears being "driven" independently rather than together. Here's a rundown on how positioning works in the human body (and triangulation systems):
Lets assume a sound is produced to your left, at a certain distance away.
1) The sound first hits your left ear with strength A
2) Time t after that, the same sound hits your right ear at strength B
3) Using the distance between your ears and t* speed of sound (which is also distance), you can "easily" calculate a bearing , though it will be a circle on a sphere since you can only calculate one of the variables
4) A bearing alone is useful, but incomplete without how far something is, which can be determined by the strength of A compared to B, since sound works on the inverse power law like most types of energy.

With that, you have have positional audio that tells you how far something is in addition to how far left or right. Headphone virtualization uses transfer functions to introduce these delays and mixes the right power balance into the left and right, so even though there are two channels, there is far more information in those two channels than you actually thought.

Why "5.1" audio is actually WORSE for that deals with how 5.1 audio works in speakers vs headphones. In speakers, you actually produce sounds at a certain, constant distance, with speakers in center, left, right, and usually two in back offset from the center. Your computer, when playing a game, will output the information to one or more of those speakers, but because they produce sound heard by both ears, you will usually only generate sound from one side (unless calibrated otherwise). When you send that data to a headphone, suddenly a sound on your left will only come out of the left, and you LOSE positional and distance information because now anything on the left side will only come from the left, and you can't calculate how far left or right it was from that latency.

(note this is for simulated sounds, true sounds are affected by your body, and those tiny changes give you the third variable so you know where the sound is. )