Recent content by StudioSound
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    The Nameless Guide To PC Gaming Audio (with binaural headphone surround sound)

    Did you check that the MB3 X-Fi device was still able to be configured as 7.1 in both instances? That's probably what caused things to sound different.
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    JRiver on Mac destroyed my entire music library

    It's far more likely that the drive failed than JRiver somehow damaging it by tagging files.
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    The Nameless Guide To PC Gaming Audio (with binaural headphone surround sound)

    Ah, I was not aware that Battlefront was only available for Home Theater setups. I don't have either game.     I believe OpenAL can do this, but it's not something that many games support. 5.1 or 7.1 mixed for headphones can still sound really good though.   The game can't send 7.1...
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    The Nameless Guide To PC Gaming Audio (with binaural headphone surround sound)

      SBX is acting as a spatializer when set like this. It's a really good spatializer, but a spatializer nonetheless. A game can't send 5.1/7.1 audio to a stereo device. The Windows device settings override anything that a game can do. Your video doesn't sound like proper 7.1 SBX Surround at...
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    The Nameless Guide To PC Gaming Audio (with binaural headphone surround sound)

      You can still apply all the other effects if you're outputting to another device, but if you want 5.1/7.1 downmixed via SBX Surround for headphones, you need to output to your on-board audio codec. It's a stupid limitation, but that's how it is. I speculated why that might be earlier in this...
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    The Nameless Guide To PC Gaming Audio (with binaural headphone surround sound)

    Open up Windows' Audio Control Panel and see whether the "Sound Blaster X-Fi MB 3" audio device is configured as Stereo or 5.1/7.1 Unless this has changed in a recent update, it only lets you select 5.1/7.1 if you're using a supported audio codec as the output device.
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    The Nameless Guide To PC Gaming Audio (with binaural headphone surround sound)

      If you're outputting directly to your ODAC, you will only be getting stereo sound from the games. MB3 only supports surround sound when outputting to on-board audio codecs.
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    JRiver on Mac, harsh and bright sound

    It shouldn't sound drastically different from anything else. The only things I could possibly think of are that you have bit-perfect playback in JRiver but the other players are resampling, or vice-versa. If you're using the new v22 you could try enabling SoX resampling instead of the default...
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    moving from Windows to Mac, is iTunes at all realistic for audiophiles?

      iTunes is not bit-perfect. The fact that it resamples instead of switching the output sample rate is proof of this.   My recommendation is JRiver since it plays just about anything and it's cross-platform. Win/Mac/Linux. (though best on Windows since it only went multiplatform a year or two...
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    The Nameless Guide To PC Gaming Audio (with binaural headphone surround sound)

    Sounds good to me with 5.1 music sources. With a 2.0 source SBX Surround acts as a spatializer which will of course sound bad.
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    dac withouth dsp, mainthing: low latency to drive desk-speakers(or active speakers?)

    You need a sound card for good headphone audio in PC games. A generic USB DAC like you are suggesting won't have any virtual surround processing. There are USB Sound Blasters available, though I would expect latency to be lower with a PCIe card and an S/PDIF connection.   If you play old...
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    JRiver Media Center 21 -- Ready To Go

      You should always have TPDF dither enabled.  JRMC's TPDF implementation does not use noise shaping. Anything else will introduce distortion during playback if any DSP is applied. That includes things like volume control. The only reason to disable it is if you're using a VST plug-in like...
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    The Nameless Guide To PC Gaming Audio (with binaural headphone surround sound)

      I think the difference is that the E5 is an iOS/Android-certified USB device while the G5 is certified to work with consoles via USB. It only appears as a stereo device to them via USB however, and does not have dolby digital decoding, so there's no way for the consoles to send it a 5.1...
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    The Nameless Guide To PC Gaming Audio (with binaural headphone surround sound)

    I was just throwing out possibilities for why they might not offer software that works with any device. I expect that the most likely answer is that they want you to buy their hardware. If you buy X-Fi MB3 and stick with your on-board audio, well they get a $30 software license from you when...
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    The Nameless Guide To PC Gaming Audio (with binaural headphone surround sound)

    Here's a comparison between hardware EAX, software-emulated EAX, and how things sound without EAX support. The differences are less obvious due to YouTube's compression, since things like reverb are most affected by audio compression, but it should hopefully be pretty clear in some of the...
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