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.

It's far more likely that the drive failed than JRiver somehow damaging it by tagging files.

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...

  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...

  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...

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.

  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.

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...

  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...

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.

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...

  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...

  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...

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...

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...

Yes, VR may finally see a resurgence in good gaming audio. There's been a void the past decade or so ever since Vista killed DirectSound3D Hardware support.   Battlefield One is sure to support Dolby Atmos, just as Star Wars Battlefront does. However I have no idea how that is currently...

  Wrong. X-Fi MB3 will only appear as a virtual 7.1 device in Windows when you are using a compatible on-board audio codec for playback. If you are using a USB DAC or any other device for playback - even a 7.1 device - then the X-Fi MB3 virtual sound device will be restricted to stereo-only...

It is not "incompetence". X-Fi MB3 is designed to only work with specific on-board audio hardware. Even if you use a 5.1 or 7.1 audio device - physical or virtual - if it's not on the hardware whitelist you're not getting virtual surround.   X-Fi MB3 worked just fine with my motherboard's...

  Adaptive Volume is the opposite of Volume Leveling. You should only use Volume Leveling, and you need to have analyzed your library before it works correctly. The most important thing to change is to set the dither to TPDF Dithering instead of the "JRiver dither" which is just RPDF dither.

If I'm honest, I have not been using the 7520 as much recently due to the comfort issues once the pads had worn flat, and not being able to find replacements that I liked - not wanting to buy another pair of overpriced Sony ones that would only last me a year. But I would say that it seems to...

  Tubing arrived today, and I agree; this is perfect if you want to stick with the original pads but either found them too shallow to begin with, or they have worn flat. Glad I kept my first set of pads that had worn flat instead of just throwing them out after replacing them. I went with the...

Lots of interesting things going on here since I last visited! I'd be very interested in hearing tracks processed through the headphones profile. I created a "generic" filter in JRiver based on the graphs posted which broadly matches the correction and it does seem to have improved the sound...

I don't mean to suggest that Tyll's measurements are wrong, just that it seems like they may not always tell the whole story. Perhaps the issue is that the measurements are incomplete, missing CSD plots for example. I do agree that there is usually a good correlation between a headphone that...

Well I can't say that I'm surprised to see it's another pair of Sony headphones that people like the sound of, which measure poorly. If you consider that the MDR-7520 are a modified MDR-Z1000 design, the results do seem accurate to Tyll's setup...

  I look forward to seeing your results. I was wondering: have you considered taking/distributing impulse measurements from the headphones that you measure, so that you can run them through a convolution engine and correct their response? This is relatively easy to do yourself for speaker...