Surround Headset for Linux - experiences?

Since I recently discovered the microphone of my old stereo headset definitively is broken and it is NOT pulse that messed everything up for a change, I will have to get myself a new headset. I'd be interested in something offering surround sound and noticed that most of the surround headsets have a stereo input as well as an USB connector. Since you can't really transmit 7.1 surround sound via one analogue stereo connector (at least not without the operating system telling it to do so), I started to be highly suspicious about that USB connector and whether using a surround headset might require the usage of proprietary windows software. Or is it simply that the headset provides an additional sound card to the PC? Does anyone have experiences with surround headsets under linux? If so, I'd be happy if you could enlighten me!

You really should invest in a Surround headset, all you get are more, smaller drivers which probably don't sound as good as full size ones.
Also take a moment to count your ears and report if count can get past two.

You can get a perfectly good surround experience with normal Headphones as demonstrated in countless on youtube videos or here
http://srobbin.com/binaural/.

To your question, i once bought a Headset witch was advertised as with surround sound, it was shipped with a small usb soundcard and installed itself as a standart usb sound device.

Surround headsets sound like trash in general and are only good for gaming. They're more directional than that virtual crap (which is badly faked surround effects through two drivers), but overall very bad quality. If you are desperate for surround sound but don't have a means of hooking such a system to your rig, you can look for something like a Tritton AX51 (have one, never use it though cuz it sucks compared to my sound system) or even a Razer Tiamat (which I heard is only good for gaming as it sounds pretty bad most of the time) which use 3.5mm jacks. USB sound devices should be avoided like the plague, as they can be a pain in the ass to use, regardless of platform. It should be noted that if you bought one of those, you would also need a sound card that supports 5.1 (Tritton AX51) or 7.1 (Razer Tiamat). A cheap Asus Xonar wouldn't be a bad choice, though I think there was some trickery involved in getting to work on my Linux partition.