[MisterX]

Alright, I've read through some of the other headphone posts, and the posts pertaining to the Sennheiser series of headphones.
Now I'm not sure what I should be getting. I'm looking for some high quality headphones, as I do not have the money, space, nor can i really have a high quality speaker system. I'm using the SoundStorm on my NF7-S.

What headphones would be the best for gaming, rock/alternative music? If I need to get an amp that's fine, but I'd like to use the Optical Digital output on my SoundStorm, as I have heard it is much better quality.
Thanks in advance.

 

[nauqneyugn]

Quote:

Originally posted by MisterX Alright, I've read through some of the other headphone posts, and the posts pertaining to the Sennheiser series of headphones. Now I'm not sure what I should be getting. I'm looking for some high quality headphones, as I do not have the money, space, nor can i really have a high quality speaker system. I'm using the SoundStorm on my NF7-S.

What price range are we talking about here?

Quote:

Originally posted by MisterX What headphones would be the best for gaming, rock/alternative music?

Without knowing a budget, I think the Grado SR80s would be a good match for your setup.

Quote:

Originally posted by MisterX If I need to get an amp that's fine, but I'd like to use the Optical Digital output on my SoundStorm, as I have heard it is much better quality.

IMHO you would be much better off buying a real sound card.
This is kinda a double edged sword so to speak...... Do you upgrade to a better analog solution or invest in a expensive decoder?
I would get the cans, upgrade the source, and add a headphone amplifier later.
A good decoder for such a system would be the Art DIO (link used for reference only). Once you mod it you will have one very nice decoder.

 

[Taurui]

I gave up on getting my soundstorm on my asus a7n8x deluxe board to work properly with headphones. They had interference like crazy, I couldn't even try to examine the actual sound quality.

I went with a terratec aureon sky for 50 bucks instead (slightly used) and now the sound has improved by 200% !

As for headphones.. I currently own the Sony CD780 and they're super-comfy! It feels like you have two pillows on your ears, so you can wear them forever (good for games). As for the sound.. the bass could be a bit tighter, and the treble is sometimes a bit harsh. But except for that, the sound is pretty good once they're broken in. I mainly listen to heavy metal / progressive metal and I really like the sound those cans produce.
Apart from that, the Grado SR80 will definitely sound better for rock, but they're not as comfortable which is bad for gaming.
The Sennheiser HD590 is supposed to be the best choice for a headphone without an amp, if you want to get an amp (another 120$ gone), the HD 580 and 600 or even 650 are the way to go.

 

[Alereon]

If you want to be able to use the digital out, you'll need to buy a DAC to convert the audio to analog so your headphones can play it. I imagine that this might cost Real Money(tm). Overall, I'm happy with the quality provided by the DAC on the Abit NF7-S, it's pretty decent in the scheme of things. I'd say around the quality of an original Audigy, maybe even a bit better. It's noticeably superior to the I2S codec on my SB Live!, which in turn is noticeably superior to the AC97 codec on the same card. I guess this is just a roundabout way of suggesting that you may want to keep using the onboard DACs rather than going to the expense of buying an external DAC and using digital output. Tradeoffs between money you spend on the DAC versus buying better headphones and a better amp, for example.

Just a hint for Soundstorm, using ASIO output from Winamp will noticeably improve audio quality over the directsound or waveout plugins. You can download an ASIO output plugin for Winamp 2.x and 5.x here. It's in Japanese, but the download links are legible. Set it to resample to 48Khz, and enable convert mono to stereo.

Tauri: The Asus A7N8X-Deluxe isn't really a fair example of a working Soundstorm implementation. Asus' version is pretty buggy, leading to problems like you experienced.

 

[ooheadsoo]

With the proper line level/gain settings and an amp, the soundstorm sounds fine. Much better than the creative offerings I have heard, especially in headphone mode. Seems most people complaining about the soundstorm are not using amps. If you paid good money for a better sound card, sure you could get better sound without a headphone amp, but with a headphone amp, you could get perfectly good sound, probably even better sound, and have a multipurpose amp. Once you have that amp, you'll be able to get a cd player, turn table, a full tweaked out rig, with the confidence that you'll get good sound out of your headphones! Ok, maybe you should get that sound card and count yourself lucky.

 

[evil-zen]

does the nvidia soundstorm resample every to 48khz as well?

 

[Alereon]

evil-zen: It's up to the DAC chip. The Realtek ALC650, used on the Abit NF7-S motherboard, does indeed resample to 48Khz. You can get the best audio quality by resampling to 48Khz using a good quality method before sending data to the DAC.