Thursday, July 8, 2010

New new headphones

7:36 PM / Technology / Comments9 Comments

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I bought a new pair of 5.1 gaming headphones to replace my faulty Roccat Kave. The Medusa NX from Speedlink is priced similarly to the Roccat Kave (approximately £50) and offers the same basic functionality and connectivity, the bonus being that, so far, these have lasted for more than the twenty-four hours I got out of Roccat's offering.

On the whole, I would say that the audio quality with the Medusa NX isn't quite up there with the Roccat Kave (the left and right channels sound noticeably less clear than the centre channel), but at the same time the channel separation is improved. With the Roccat Kave, the surrounds weren't all that distinct from the left and right front channels; now, they actually do a passable imitation of coming from behind me. Of course it would be ridiculous to expect a pair of headphones to deliver the same level of positional sound as a dedicated 5.1 speaker setup, but the effect is really not bad at all for £50. They also have a nifty feature whereby they compensate for the lack of a dedicated subwoofer by converting the LFE data into a subtle (or not so subtle, depending on how high you set the slider) vibration effect. D-Box eat your heart out!

 
9 Comments

1. FoxyMulder said:

I have a pair of Sennheiser HD570 headphones, theyre old but sound fabulous ( not surround ) Not all Sennheaiser headphones sound great but i think the HD570 is fab, no longer on sale though.

The good thing is you can replace just about everything on the phones should they ever need repairs.

I sound like a salesman for Sennheiser.

(Posted on Thursday, July 8, 2010 at 9:33 PM)

2. Kram Sacul said:

I'm not sure you're going to find any decent sounding "surround sound" headphones. My advice is to go with a really nice stereo headphone (Sennheiser, Grado, etc.) connected to a decent amp.

(Posted on Thursday, July 8, 2010 at 11:42 PM)

3. ChuckZ said:

I've been using Sennheiser HD 600 headphones for almost 2 years now and I've never had any problem. What I love about them is that any part is replaceable. You can buy a new cable for $10 or new ear pads for like $15. I got them pretty cheap too ($235 new).

(Posted on Friday, July 9, 2010 at 4:16 AM)

4. Author Profile Page Michael said:

Kram:

Well, I've bought these now, and I consider them to be acceptable for the price, so for the time being I won't be looking for any alternatives. I consider positional audio pretty much a mandatory feature for games anyway, so if it comes to a trade-off between sound quality and 5.1 support, 5.1 will tend to win out for me.

As for Sennheisers (since all three of you have mentioned them!), I've used a couple of pairs of their headphones (nothing fancy, just entry level stereo phones) in the past and been pretty happy with them, but I haven't had enough experience with them to have any real opinion on the brand.

(Posted on Friday, July 9, 2010 at 5:13 PM)

5. Kentai said:

I've been using my stereo Sony MDR-V600 for close to a year now, I think - I'm no Canophile, but for the price they provided the quality I was looking for. Certainly dropping an extra hundred or two would net me better specs, and a separate amp might help, but when I'm spending all day listening to scratchy VHS copies of old Mono films I'm not sure how much fidelity I really need...

Are you playing games with discreet 5.1, or are most of them matrixed from fewer channels these days?

(Posted on Saturday, July 10, 2010 at 1:36 AM)

6. Author Profile Page Michael said:

Kentai:

Most games nowadays, PC or console, support discrete 5.1. This is complicated by the fact that, with Windows Vista, Microsoft ditched support for DirectSound3D, meaning that any existing games made using that format no longer supported hardware acceleration or anything great than two-channel audio. Luckily, Creative came up with a solution in the form of ALchemy, a piece of software which converts DirectSound3D and EAX titles to OpenAL on the fly, re-enabling multi-channel audio and hardware acceleration. This is a lifesaver (well, not literally, but...) for games like WARCRAFT III, DIABLO II and GUILD WARS, which I was used to playing with 5.1 audio in Windows XP.

(Posted on Saturday, July 10, 2010 at 4:22 PM)

7. FoxyMulder said:

I come to my computer today to find 23 spam comments, i mean for God's sake 23 spam comments from the same person obviously using a Proxy server to change IP numbers, i can tell they are the same person though.

I have comments on moderation and they must be approved first so i cannot understand why they persist, they must be idiots.

I thought i would post that and ask if you have suffered any spam today.

Check these headphones out.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sharkoon-X-Tatic-Revision-Certified-Headphones/dp/B000GIXISM

A rumble dial, nice gimmick and i wonder if it works well or not, reminds me of the things you can get to put under your couch and make it vibrate with explosions, some seventies movies like Rollercoaster and Earthquake had that in the cinema.

Of course gimmicks are nothing new, the Vincent Price 1959 movie The Tingler gave audiences little electric shocks while sitting watching the film in the cinema.

(Posted on Monday, July 12, 2010 at 10:57 AM)

8. Author Profile Page Michael said:

Foxymulder:

Spam is almost always automated. I highly doubt there's some idiot sitting in front of a computer personally typing comments into your blog.

I've received two or three spam comments so far today - the usual "This is a wonderful web site I will be sure to check back" rubbish - but the volume of it actually hasn't been too bad of late.

(Posted on Monday, July 12, 2010 at 11:46 AM)

9. FoxyMulder said:

Must be my day for it then since that post i have had another 16 spam comments all with the exact same link, the IP changes though so thats why i was thinking they are coming to the blog since if it was automated wouldn't they have the same IP number. ?

I guess it could be automated bots but someone has to target them to my site surely. ?

I will probably do some investigating and get more knowledge of this subject, it seems they are trying to promote links to one site more than anything else. Hmm maybe there are people buying this so called promotion service not realising how much it bugs site owners.

(Posted on Monday, July 12, 2010 at 3:49 PM)

 
To combat spam, commenting is automatically disabled on entries older than 30 days.

Did a comment you tried to post accidentally get eaten by the spam filter? It happens from time to time. I get upwards of 200 spam comments every day and unfortunately don't have the time to weed through all of them in case something genuine ended up there by mistake. If one of your posts gets incorrectly flagged as spam, email me at m.r.mackenzie[at]gmail[dot]com and I'll do my best to retrieve it.

 
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