Foobar volume drops a lot while ingame

Hey guys, so im loving my new headphones and soundcard, but last night I noticed that when Im ingame in 1.6 and thers lots of guns being fired around me and stuff, the volume of foobar drops significantly.  

I'm just trying to get an idea of what may be going on so i know how to fix it.  most/all of the extra settings (SVN, dolby headphone, etc) with my soundcard drivers are disabled.  its set to 2 channels and the mixer has the right and left channel at 76/100

my phones are relatively quiet even with only my media player going also, probably in the lower-mid range of where i would generally listen.

My phones are the DT880/600 and my soundcard is the Asus Xonar Essence ST

Intel i7 920

6 GB triple channel OCZ ram

hec Zephyr 750w continuous power supply

do these phones just need external amping that much?  or is there another issue here?

bump?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Slogra 

Guess you have to disable SVN. It seems to be some kind of Dynamic Range Compression, which is always bad, and indeed fluctuates the volume.

Oh sorry, SVN is already disabled, I seem to have forgotten to finish that sentence in my OP

Quote:

Originally Posted by HammerSandwich 

Do you have a mic?  Check control panel/sound/communications.

checked that and it was indeed set to reduce volume by 80%, thanks!  Havent had a chance to see if that  solved things yet but hopefully so!

Quote:

Originally Posted by freestyler 

Also make sure to have the sliders on mixer-playback tab (asus control panel) at the default value (76) to avoid any sound limiter kicking in.

yea i really think this was the issue, i had turned it up to 100, i dropped it back to 76 just now and i think that fixed it.

but now my stuff is just really quiet.  is there a dsp or plugin or anything for foobar so i can just up the volume more?

extra high gain?  wheres this setting at?  and I have everything scanned as a single album to level all the volumes, but i'd like to boost it all

Quote:

Originally Posted by freestyler 

You don't get enough volume even with "extra high gain" on the 600ohm cans?

Ouch. I guess you can try adding replay-gain info on your song tags. From what i know it doesn't degrade the quality but you have to search a bit on how to do it. I never used it.

wow I feel like a jackoff for not ever checking that lol, my stuff was set on normal :O
 

Quote:

Originally Posted by freestyler 

The setting on the asus control panel. I'm sure you know it but i'll attach a picture to make sure.

You have to set this on the highest setting for high impedance headphones.