Here’s something I’ve never understood.

There is an obsession with gaming headsets for playing FPS games to give you a competitive edge - helping you pinpoint footsteps and other sounds to figure out where your opponents are. This, I assume, comes purely down to how well the headset can recreate the stereo image.

Which is weird to me because headphones are known to be quite misleading re: the stereo image! As a producer, I would never 100% trust mixes on headphones and would need to check the imaging on studio monitors. If they are calibrated with something like Sonarworks, Dirac or Genelec GLM, the precision of the stereo imaging is second to none.

So for the sake of argument, is it true that calibrated studio monitors actually give you more of a competitive edge than headphones? Or is there something that I’m missing?