Mad Lust Envy's Headphone Gaming Guide: (Updated: 5/17/13. Skullcandy PLYR 1 added) - Page 771

 

I generally favor the X-Fi Titanium HD over most other sound cards on the market wherever gaming is concerned, due to feature set and excellent audio quality. Do note that I have a slight bias toward somewhat older titles, where most of the X-Fi gaming features beyond CMSS-3D Headphone are utilized.

 

The lack of a proper headphone amp IC is no drawback to me, as it wouldn't drive my Stax setup anyway, and my dynamic cans of choice are sensitive enough to work well out of anything.

 

 

To my knowledge, Dolby Pro Logic IIz is actually 9.1, with two added height channels over 7.1. Signal-wise, the height channels are matrixed into two of the existing channels for a 7.1 setup. So far, I know of absolutely no games that utilize it.

 

I don't have any specs off the top of my head for the Titanium HD's headphone jack; amplifiers were never my strong suit anyway. I'm just concerned about the headphones being able to function at all.

 

Oh, and here's a heads-up for everyone: Stax SR-207 + SRM-252S! It won't sell cheaply at this rate, though. There's also an SRM-1/Mk2 Pro that I'd like to get my hands on, but I just can't afford it right now...not that I really even need it, but it would really cut down on all the clutter on my desk.

Apav,
Sounds like good fortune for you! The other benefit of the Zx module, besides keeping things neat and convenient, is it supplies a mic that's supposed to be good at focusing on your voice and canceling out fans & keyboards & stuff. Listen to your headphones with music first, then compare your amp to the card's headphone out once you get it! I'm quite interested in the new Creative stuff, though (as I said) torn about the Ti HD too (and poor, lol).

Most hi-fi headphones (and one $2 headphone I saw Chicolom buy 0_o) come with a 1/4 to 1/8 plug adapter (6.3mm to 3.5mm adapter, just the plug, looks like a bullet), so you may not need to go out and buy one. The Zx module also has both sized outlets

Edit: hmmmmmmmm... That bundled amp? 50mW? I'm thinking....... the iPod's built-in amp is more powerful than that For comparison, a FiiO E11 produces about 300mW at 32 Ohms, and the E9 (and my E12) produces over 3x that much. It'll be interesting to read your findings

Edited by Evshrug - 2/3/13 at 2:40pm

That's weird.. Its an amp designed for studio use according to the product website.. You can plug in four headphones at once..they have a combo deal of this amp and four of their headphones on amazon! Maybe the amazon page is wrong.. An iPod can't be more powerful than this! Lol

Very interesting comparison and overall impression of the X1, I look forward to your follow up post(s) about it... I really wish Philips would stop teasing us and release the damn things here already, sigh. I really want to try them out as a complement to my DT 880! (possibly for living room duty, primarily anyway)

I was thinking of getting a Magni along with them if I didn't enjoy the X1's sound out of my AVR's headphone out, but I've come to realize the RCA pre outs on the AVR won't work for any of the connected HDMI devices... I guess worst case scenario I just run the Magni off the headphone out or directly off my DVR's RCA out.

Did you notice anything peculiar when/if you swapped cables? There's some posts on the X1 thread about the stock cable supposedly not sounding right, tho as with most discussions about cables the whole thing seems very suspect to me.

I do like that it's easily replaceable tho, OTOH I figured 1/4" to 1/8" cables would be fairly common but Monoprice doesn't have any... I know you could just use a straight 1/4" cable plus an adapter, just seemed odd.
Edited by Impulse - 2/3/13 at 9:56pm

Ordered my K702's yesterday. Couldn't afford Annies unfortunately, but still worth it over the K/Q701's since I like the aesthetics better on the K702's. Very nice looking cans IMO. Now to start saving up for that ZxR and research amps!

Hello,

 

I want to buy new headphones. I will use them almost exclusively for gaming. I game on PC, I don't care about isolation, I won't use the headphones out of home, I want over-ear headphones and I don't need a a microphone attached to the headphones. The only important things for me are comfort (super important) and of course sound that suits my needs.

 

As for amp, I read some about them and got the basic idea of the amps (and that's it, I have a really small knowledge about amps). I would like to ask how important an amp is for me, and should I get one considering my budget? If yes, then which one to get?

BTW, the main genre I play is FPS.

 

My budget for both headphones and amp: 400$ 

 

Thank you very much :)

Yes, it's a studio amp. Like I said, it'll be interesting to read your findings. When the amazon page JUST quotes a mW rating without saying what Ohm load it was measured at, then the rating is pretty meaningless/unhelpful. I based my above comparison on assuming that the 50 mW was rated at the most common (modern) ohm rating, 32 Ohms, but if the amp provides 50 mW for a 300 or 600 Ohm load, then it would be quite powerful indeed.

Still, studio amping and recreational amping requirements are different. You may like it in the meantime, possibly like the DT990s even more straight from the soundcard. Since my best guess is just a guess, I'm more interested in your experience.

 

 

Thanks for the feedback all.  I feel like a bit of a doof, though, as I was so caught up in the "omg, helicopters are flying OVER my head" moment, that I completely glossed over the giant 10.2 staring me in the face!    Yeah, definitely not a home setup there.  Kinda neat about the Pro Logic IIz carrying subtle height channels, though.

 

Also cool to hear about the different content people test their cans with.  Even though it's dated, something I always like to test is the speeder bike chase from Return of the Jedi.  

Grizzly,
Comfort, or at least maximum comfort, is different for everybody. Weight, clamping pressure, earpad material and shape, headband design... hard to guess what'll be MOST comfortable for you. I can only make a suggestion from my experience, but you may still prefer something else.

I like the comfort of my AKGs a lot – the clamp is just right, not too heavy, the earpads don't touch my ears at all which feels great, but the headband bumps irritate me if I wear them for over 30 minutes or frequently, so I wrapped it with a plush baby's seatbelt cover. As far as sound goes, the do reach "god mode!" Wile in FPS gaming, though the sound has much more body and depth when powered to full potential. In general, if you want competitive FPS gaming, you want a (comfortable) headphone that offers a lot of detail, a balanced frequency response (or even bass-shy to concentrate on tactical sounds like footsteps, reloads, grenade "TINK!"s, wizzing bullets, etc), good separation (so different sounds don't blend together), a wide and deep soundstage (IMO the more evenly "round" the soundstage, the better/more natural), and responds well to virtual surround processing (a given if the headphone has all the above).

Some soundcards provide "enough" power with their built-in amps, like the one in Asus' Xonar essence STX soundcard, and perhaps in Creative's new Z-series soundcards. Optionally, you could separately buy a desktop amp like the FiiO E90k, Schiit Magni, and others (I have a very powerful portable FiiO E12 I'm testing now, but I've also loved the results from my Tube hybrid amp). The world of amping is a whole engineering science of it's own, but mainly if you can find an amp that supplies a lot of current (like the ones I mentioned above), then you should be golden with just about any headphone. An amp, ideally, has a very high signal to noise ratio (S:N or SNR) and adds negligible "color" to the sound, you want to have a headphone that "sounds right" and just have an amp for power. A "colorless" amp is also more versatile if you decide to use other headphones someday.

Lastly, we'll talk about source by jumping back to soundcards (hope I'm not confusing you, I'm basically tracing back the components of a music system starting from the headphones). A soundcard is mainly in charge of Digital file into Analogue sound signal Conversion (DAC), as well as adding processing such as surround processing. The two major soundcard manufacturers right now are Asus (with it's Xonar line that uses Dolby Headphone for surround) and Creative (which currently offer CMSS-3D, THX TruStudio Pro, and SBX Pro Studio for surround). I describe the differences between surround processing and give some samples in my article here. For your budget, you can pick up some great headphones and a nice soundcard that you probably won't need to upgrade in the foreseeable future. The more I read, the more I'm partial to Creative's offerings for gaming, but some people simply love Dolby Headphone.

In summary, I would personally spend your budget on a pair of AKG Q701 and a Creative Sound Blaster Z, and buy a wrap for my headband, but your mileage may vary, so read the reviews in the first post of this thread, pick a good competitive one, and don't skimp out on a quality sound card. GL HF!

Now I gotta go watch some Star Wars, thanks! And I'm not even being all that sarcastic, lol!

Nothing wrong with that! 

 

Me gusta indeed! The seperation is the most noticeable difference in my opinion, it is literally night and day between the two. The soundstage difference is more subtle but I'm confident that the X1's are bigger.

 

 

Yeah I had read something similar about the RCA outputs for recievers not supporting output from a digital input before but didn't do any further reading on it as it would be kinda ridiculous for me to get another reciever and only use one HDMI input on it, it woulda been nice to be able to use the HDMI out from my graphics card into some super simplified reciever that supported RCA output and could provide virtual surround - guess I'm dreaming for now though eh.

 

As for the cable: I'm yet to swap them because I can't really find anything suitable to replace it with! The jack on the actual headphones is positioned directly next to the earpad meaning that the housing around the jack has to be extremely minimalistic. I'm yet to find a decent length 1/8" terminated cable that doesn't feature some huge housing, I guess it's supposed to be a sign of a high build quality or better sound (don't want to get into a 'cable magic' argument though) but it's rather inconvenient - I've seen images of one guy taking a knife to the housing but I don't think I really fancy that...

 

And as for the connector size aspect - this is the only other thing that has me worried. The Mixamp has an 1/8" output but the cable on the X1's is a 1/4" termination though it comes with an adaptor, the disadvantage of the cable/adapter combo being that way round though is that the actual start of the cable is around 3" from the output on the Mixamp. I don't really like the idea of something falling on it or someone walking into it and damaging the output on the Mixamp but I suppose this depends on the size of the jack on your amp of choice.

 

---

 

On a final note: I've put the amp on hold for a while - the reason being that there is a possibility of a new model being released shortly to replace the amp I'm looking at but mainly it's because I'm now skint having bought a Creative Titanium HD to serve as a DAC and surround processor. I'll stick up my thoughts on DH vs MyEars vs CMSS-3D vs THX/SBX when it arrives but will be using the X1 for my testing this time around.

Edited by Fulch36 - 2/4/13 at 11:54am

Sounds like you'd just need to find a standard 1/8" straight cable with slim ends, that way you don't need to use any adapters... I'd sill have to use an adapter on the AVR or Magni end tho I guess that's not a big deal. The Monoprice mobile cable might be an option, not their best shielded or thickest cable so I guess it'd depend on the length you need.

Simplified receiver? At that point, it seems like you're just talking about a DAC with surround processing, RCA outputs and a video pass-through. Easier just to have a good headphone amp built into the receiver so you can have it all-in-one. However, using the Creative soundcard, with RCA line-out to a dedicated amp, is basically what you described (as long as the processing still occurs).

The other thing is that the Ti HD basically uses THX surround outside the gaming mode, that might make a difference compared to integrating it more fully, BUT you'll probably have a good time anyway with CMSS-3D like nameless does.

Apparently, the HD800 has better depth than the Annies (maybe depth as well). The only think lacking is in height, which is something the Annies also lack (I've noticed this personally). This just makes me want to audition them for gaming even more. I imagine they would be ideal for 7.1. Binaural gaming not so much, depending in the enemies are coming from above. For that you're probably better off with a more uniform representation of sound provided by the significantly more expensive SR-009.

 

For what it's worth, I just bout a Sony GDM-FW900 CRT off Accurateit.com for 399.99. They actually increased the price once they sold a few units the bastards. Anyway, hopefully it will be worth it. Now I actually have to buy a new desk/stand for this thing. Weighing 42 kg (92.6 lbs) there is no whey it will rest on my feeble desk. 

 

I was actually thinking of the omnimount echo 50 for ~$110 on amazon.com.

Edited by Roger de Ceiba - 2/4/13 at 2:43pm