First time really caring about sound, need some help (headphones/sound card)

Sorry to budge in on your thread like this but I'm also here to ask a similar question.

but I'll try to answer your question to the best of my knowledge before I ask away. :)

well, i'm in a similar situation as you are. It is the first time I'm considering getting a soundcard... and a decent one at that!

So, I researched a bit and found out a few things.

first of all, for gamers, x-fi titanium HD seems to be a good choice. I heard it is good for both gaming AND music. Driver issues seem to be a problem of the past. It just sounds like a great card overall. So, I decided to get this one.

I also looked into headphones. I decided to go with either the AudioTechnica AD700 or AD900.

Becuz, from what i've read, the open form of the AD series compared to the closed form of the A series provides a bigger soundstage, which is apparently better for positional audio. It might have the possible disadvantage of less bass and poor sound isolation, but that isn't really my priority.

well, hoping that was a little help to you, I now want to ask my question.

Since I can only get either the headphone or soundcard first, which one should i go with?

if it is the soundcard, then i'll be using it with a 2.0 speaker setup. to be specific, the gigaworks t20 sii.

will, these speakers be able to produce the difference the x-fi titanium HD is able to produce over an onboard?

another question is... when will the successor to the x-fi titanium be released? like, titanium HD 2 or something. does anyone know?

thx

I think you are on the wrong sub-forum...

Still, don't think you can wrong with both the Fiio e10 and ATH-A700 under 200$

Any reason why you picked the Xonar DX over the DG? Perhaps you don't have a PCI slot free?

Personally, if I were to go above the Xonar DG, it would be a Creative X-Fi Titanium HD, maybe an Auzentech X-Fi Forte, depending on availability and pricing. However, that would eat significantly into the budget available for headphones, and neither BF3 nor Skyrim use EAX 3/4/5 (though if you still play Battlefield Vietnam/2/2142 at all, those do).

As for headphones...SR850 might be a safe bet, along with one of the popular Fischer Audio offerings. Can't say for sure without having tried them myself. AD900 would be another safe bet for sure, but would likely exceed your budget a little and leave no room for a sound card, not even the Xonar DG.

Cheap sound card for gaming

Asus Xonar DG ($30, PCI), has a half-way decent headphone amplifier rated up to 150-Ohms

Comes with Dolby Headphone, great for surround sound for movies, should also help with games.

Has OpenAL and GX 2.5, GX emulates EAX 5.0, has mixed resultes.

The Asus Xonar DX, $60-$80, will not offer anything better then the DG for headphone support.

DX will offer better sound for analog 5.1 & 7.1 speakers.

Creative Labs EAX 5.0 was king during Windows XP, but Vista and Win 7 do not natively support it,

Creative has a work around for It's X-Fi cards.

Not really sure how much EAX is still used with current games?

Personally I do not care about EAX.

Lots of people game fine without using EAX.

Very soon Creative Labs will start selling their new sound card, the Recon3D (SB1350) PCI-Express

Comes with a headphone amplifier rated for up to 600-Ohm.

I'm sure it will be a great card for everything.

Price around $100.

Lots of external headphone amplifier/DACs make great sound, they themselves are Stereo 2.0, no surround sound (like 5.1 for movies and FPS games).

Still need a separate sound card create more then Stereo 2.0 (or 2.1)

Cheap headphones for gaming

Samson SR850 $40 (semi-open, made by Superlux), 32-Ohm, low cost headphones that get good reviews for gaming, music and movies.

Open headphones are usually better for FPS shooter games.

Quote:

Originally Posted by clicheispasse 
Those headphones are among the few I was looking into. 

In any case, are you recommending I go with the Xonar DG or Fiio E10? Or are you saying that in order for the USB DAC to be worth it I'd need a sound card?

With just music and if you only played games in stereo 2.0, the E10 would be fine.

I'm far from an expert on DAC/USB interaction and on what can and can not be sent out of a computer's USB port to a external DAC.

The Asus Xonar DG is a nice low cost sound card, great features (like Dolby) for $20-$30, I like to recommend it, because if you want to replace it,

you've only wasted $30.

Where as the Fiio can be used with PCs, Macs, IPods, iPhones, iPads, mp3 players, etc. Can work with more headphones then the DG.

I really prefer using a nice all in one sound card and had no problem spending $130 for a used Essence STX and $15 for upgrading the op-amps.

In the past two years i have spent about $275 on computer audio, $160 on tube headphone amplifiers, and about $700 for assorted headphones.

But i do like to try to help new Head-Fiers wisely spend their money on audio.

It's also 1AM locally, and I'm feeling brain dead
 

Quote:

Originally Posted by PurpleAngel 

Creative Labs EAX 5.0 was king during Windows XP, but Vista and Win 7 do not natively support it,

Creative has a work around for It's X-Fi cards.

Not really sure how much EAX is still used with current games?

Personally I do not care about EAX.

Lots of people game fine without using EAX.

Let me elaborate on this point:

-The new sound stack introduced in Vista got rid of DirectSound3D, which is a shame. Most older games did hardware-accelerated sound through DirectSound3D, which is why you need ALchemy or a similar wrapper to restore EAX support. However, OpenAL remains unaffected (which is why ALchemy works in the first place), and later games in the 2004-2006 period (Unreal Tournament 2004/3, Battlefield 2/2142) just use OpenAL directly. (Unfortunately, it appears that Creative isn't very easygoing with game developers, and so the developers opted to ignore OpenAL for the most part in spite of the advantages. This is why you don't see EAX mentioned much anymore.)

-EAX is about the reverb, chorus, and occlusion effects you hear in the game environment. When you enter a large hall you'd expect to be full of reverberation, the game engine tells that to the sound card, and the sound card processes everything accordingly with its DSP. Keep in mind that running this stuff on the sound card was a big deal years ago, when CPUs were much slower and only had a single core to do everything with.

-My thought on this is that playing a game that was developed with EAX in mind and not having it enabled would not allow you to hear it as the developers intended it to be heard. The point of audiophilia is to hear it as the artist intended, is it not? Because the source has some level of synthesis and on-the-fly processing going on, it's not as simple of a matter as reproducing music faithfully would be. The big problem is that there is no software fallback routine for these effects (when going above EAX 2, which was effectively part of DirectSound3D and every sound device supports it), thus you're missing the intended sound without compliant hardware. Think about how people spend so much on graphics cards just to turn on every little shader effect. Why overlook the sound in a similar manner?

-There's another reason to use ALchemy on old DirectSound3D games that doesn't involve EAX, and that reason is surround sound. Both DirectSound3D and OpenAL do not declare sound in terms of speaker positions (be it stereo up to 7.1) like software audio engines do, but describe sounds using 3D spatial coordinates and let the sound card driver decide where and how those sounds should be played, as it should be. CMSS-3D Headphone can tap into this spatial information if it is provided and process every virtual sound source directly, which makes it less like 7.1 emulation and more like proper binaural sound.

Personally, I'm not so much concerned about having EAX present in newer games so much as having either OpenAL utilized to give that proper 3D sound stage for CMSS-3D Headphone to work its best, or having whatever software audio engine they use to have a binaural sound option for us headphone users instead of reducing everything to one-dimensional stereo (only left/right panning, no sense of front/back or up/down). It's bad enough that we're going back to 2D sound because they think 7.1 with its lack of height channels is all we need.

Two headphones for different tasks? Interesting choice...I thought you'd just stick to one headphone for the time being.

Depending on how affordably you can get one, I was thinking Titanium HD instead of the E10, unless you really need USB connectivity. That, or a Xonar DG and one more expensive headphone that might trounce the other two combined. Of course, this depends largely on whether you want CMSS-3D Headphone, Dolby Headphone, or can get by with plain stereo while gaming more than anything else, and the E10, like most USB DACs, offers neither.

Quote:

Originally Posted by clicheispasse 
Judging by the sort of reviews Creative has gotten and the sort of driver issues people seem to have with them, I think I'll stay away from them. 

Is the Xonar DG worth it? Granted it's only $30, but I don't want to spend something that's basically the same as my on-board audio. 

I was actually looking at the HT | Omega Striker, or the Xonar DX. Opinion on either of these?

I just don't want my first dive into the audiophile world to be tained by a wrong choice. 

When I say gaming, mainly what I mean is that it has to have good 'positional' audio - I play FPS games such as Counter Strike and Battlefield, and that feature is a really important one. 

As far as music goes, the main thing I listen to is rock, and various sub-genres within rock. 

For using headphones, the DX does not offer any advantages over the DG.

The DX would be better for analog 5.1 or 7.1 speakers.