meatwad
Head-Fier
- Joined
- Aug 18, 2009
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So I am faced with a dilemma. I play a lot of video games, but I want my music to sound awesome. I currently have a Creative X-Fi Xtremegamer. It does pretty well in terms of gaming, as far as positional sound and all that... i don't ask much out of it other than the EAX options in most games. to be completely frank, I don't really know how much of a difference the EAX makes, which is worth considering.
And at the same time, this card leaves a lot to be desired, musically. It's definitely not top-shelf music material, and I feel like it is a bottleneck in my system. I have Sennheiser HD580 (thanks Koven!) and HD280s, which I haven't really used at all since getting the 580s. And, I have an ever-growing collection of flac / 320kbps / vbr music library, and I really find myself sticking to this music over the low-to-mid bitrate stuff I've acquired over the years. I do not currently have a dedicated desktop amp, but that's on my purchase list for the near future.
I have been looking at the Little Dot amps... at first I thought the MkIII would be a good choice as the price is great, tubes could be fun to play around with and it has received a lot of positive feedback. Then I read another review praising the virtues of the MkV, which I have to say looks like a very appealing amp. I am leaning toward the MkV for its dual inputs, which brings me to my next point.
On one hand I don't want to lose the gaming "performance" of my sound card, so I don't want to completely ditch sound cards entirely and go straight to a USB DAC. But as it stands my current sound card does not have the nicer outputs, and it isn't all that great of a DAC I guess. Some people have mentioned using two sound cards - one for games, and one for their music and junk. I guess you can assign your computer to send certain programs to either sound card. So, I could have games all run on the X-Fi, and everything else run on a sound card that's better for music, which could well be a USB DAC. The Little Dot seems like a fantastic amp for this position because with the two inputs that can be easily switched to and from on the amp, I could keep both the X-Fi and the other DAC hooked up simultaneously and switch back and forth as needed - the idea of crawling around under my desk every time I want to go from game to music and back to game is a ridiculous idea that I will not entertain
But maybe I could get the best of both worlds with a great sound card that doesn't skimp on game features, yet can still be great for music. Cards that come to mind are the ASUS and the HT Omega Claro cards. The Claro Halo has the built-in headphone amp, which is appealing as I could use the built-in headphone amp for a while, until I wanted to upgrade further. And, pretty much any sound card just a bit nicer than mine will have the fancier outputs for upgrades even beyond that.
is there a way for the sound card to do the game processing, but skip the DAC part, if that makes sense? I don't know. For any gamers out there that have faced this dilemma, I would appreciate feedback. Especially if you went from an X-Fi card to anything else, and how you think that effected (or didn't effect) gaming performance!
And at the same time, this card leaves a lot to be desired, musically. It's definitely not top-shelf music material, and I feel like it is a bottleneck in my system. I have Sennheiser HD580 (thanks Koven!) and HD280s, which I haven't really used at all since getting the 580s. And, I have an ever-growing collection of flac / 320kbps / vbr music library, and I really find myself sticking to this music over the low-to-mid bitrate stuff I've acquired over the years. I do not currently have a dedicated desktop amp, but that's on my purchase list for the near future.
I have been looking at the Little Dot amps... at first I thought the MkIII would be a good choice as the price is great, tubes could be fun to play around with and it has received a lot of positive feedback. Then I read another review praising the virtues of the MkV, which I have to say looks like a very appealing amp. I am leaning toward the MkV for its dual inputs, which brings me to my next point.
On one hand I don't want to lose the gaming "performance" of my sound card, so I don't want to completely ditch sound cards entirely and go straight to a USB DAC. But as it stands my current sound card does not have the nicer outputs, and it isn't all that great of a DAC I guess. Some people have mentioned using two sound cards - one for games, and one for their music and junk. I guess you can assign your computer to send certain programs to either sound card. So, I could have games all run on the X-Fi, and everything else run on a sound card that's better for music, which could well be a USB DAC. The Little Dot seems like a fantastic amp for this position because with the two inputs that can be easily switched to and from on the amp, I could keep both the X-Fi and the other DAC hooked up simultaneously and switch back and forth as needed - the idea of crawling around under my desk every time I want to go from game to music and back to game is a ridiculous idea that I will not entertain
But maybe I could get the best of both worlds with a great sound card that doesn't skimp on game features, yet can still be great for music. Cards that come to mind are the ASUS and the HT Omega Claro cards. The Claro Halo has the built-in headphone amp, which is appealing as I could use the built-in headphone amp for a while, until I wanted to upgrade further. And, pretty much any sound card just a bit nicer than mine will have the fancier outputs for upgrades even beyond that.
is there a way for the sound card to do the game processing, but skip the DAC part, if that makes sense? I don't know. For any gamers out there that have faced this dilemma, I would appreciate feedback. Especially if you went from an X-Fi card to anything else, and how you think that effected (or didn't effect) gaming performance!