Shadowex3 Posted October 21, 2009 Content Count: 2959 Joined: 02/27/08 Status: Offline Share Posted October 21, 2009 Beforehand lemme just say that (and I'ma let ya finish) this is about how to pick a good headphone set (and especially how to avoid shitty ones) moreso than an actual recommendation of which one because of your budget: Generally when headphones are built for gaming or designed to alter sound for it what that means is that it's designed like a bose, as in "No Highs, no Lows, it must be a Bose". Big boomy midrange bass may make gunshots and footsteps stick out compared to other sounds, but at the cost of a lot of noise and loss of audio quality as well as being useless for listening to music or really anything else. Your brain is hardwired to interpret sounds, you want a headphone to do as little alteration to the sounds as possible both for clarity and for less ear fatigue. Listening to all that THOOMBOOMBOOM in the mids with the highs and lows clipped off will very quickly wear your ears out, that's why I suggest to everyone using headphones to play with "snd_digital_surround" set to "1" rather than the default of "0" and in 5.1 mode. Especially if they have a CMSS3D compatible soundcard. On top of that for the price of those things you could easily get a nice set of Audio Technica's or Sennheiser HD555's which are absolutely known to be pretty much the most popular gaming headphones among anyone who isn't getting paid to use them. The fact that Steel Series always hides their THD levels while everyone worth anything (Sennheiser, audio technica, etc) brags about how low theirs is should tell you something about the "quality" of Steel's products. Now $50 or less is obv in the low end of what headphones can be, just like over $150 is pretty squarely into the "overdoing it" range most of the time. But you can still be careful about what you get and how you get it. Sennheiser and Audio Technica are obv good names, Plantronics is relatively trustworthy if on the lower end of the quality scale, logitech makes fairly decent but pretty quiet microphones, and naturally USB or "gaming" anything is going to be a gimmicky POS compared to actual quality goods. Link to comment
Red Posted October 21, 2009 Content Count: 6559 Joined: 03/14/07 Status: Offline Share Posted October 21, 2009 ^ he speaks the truth Link to comment
PotshotPolka Posted October 21, 2009 Content Count: 6084 Joined: 03/31/08 Status: Offline Share Posted October 21, 2009 I got a Sony MDR-V500 headset and the same mic as Red, together costing about $100. Link to comment
Shmoked Posted October 21, 2009 Content Count: 230 Joined: 10/01/09 Status: Offline Share Posted October 21, 2009 I use a 5.1 surround sound head set. Yea. that's right, 5.1 surround. 2 speakers in each side! http://saitek.com/uk/prod/cyborg5.htm http://www.futurelooks.com/saitek-cyborg-51-surround-sound-gaming-headset-review/ 10/10!! Link to comment
Shadowex3 Posted October 21, 2009 Content Count: 2959 Joined: 02/27/08 Status: Offline Share Posted October 21, 2009 (edited) I use a 5.1 surround sound head set. Yea. that's right, 5.1 surround. 2 speakers in each side! http://saitek.com/uk/prod/cyborg5.htm http://www.futurelooks.com/saitek-cyborg-51-surround-sound-gaming-headset-review/ 10/10!! And this is the other thing I need to keep debunking, here's this post from an even older thread. Bonus points since I KNOW someone's going to bring up bose and I hit that too in the old thread: No highs, no lows, it must be a bose! Sound is a complicated subject, it suffers more than anything else in the computing industry from bullshit and woo-woo. If half of what Bose or most similar companies (monster...) claimed was true then James Randi would owe them a check for $1,000,000 for breaking the laws of physics. Lets get this out of the way early: "Surround sound" headphones are bullshit. Not only is it physically a ludicrous proposition but if the guys really were stupid/crazy enough to put several tiny earbud sized drivers in fullsized headphones it's probably going to sound like ass compared to REAL headphones. Following that is most things with "gaming" slapped on them. Just about any "gaming" set of headphones is going to be inferior to a normal set. Gimmicky surround or gaming headphones also tend to "color" the sound, usually through having a poor frequency response. You get a lot of impressive sounding hot air at first but it fatigues your ear after a while and just doesn't hold up to something that can faithfully reproduce what you throw at it. Empirical science is where it's at and legitimate measurable facts put Sennheiser HD555's and equivalent Audio Technica AD700 headphones are good quality phones that will last you a LONG time if you don't break them. I've got the 555's bigger brother the 595's and they're good too but also at the top end of your budget. The frequency response is excellent, their THD is extremely low, they don't need specialized hardware but they will benefit from amps and the like if you want, and since they aren't USB you can use your soundcard with them. TL;DR: $100 AD700, $90 HD555, and the big daddy $195 HD595. [edit] For the people who bought the hype and market-image of bose: A few reasons why bose sucks. There is a reason why bose sued consumer reports, and refuses to publish empirical data on their stuff. Look up the tests people have done on boses to see why they don't. Variations of +-10db aren't unheard of for boses stuff, try comparing that even to $60 sennheisers and you won't even be able to fit the bose speaker's response on the same chart. I don't even want to know what their total harmonic distortion is. Seriously, I'm not joking. THINK for a second about what you just bought. You bought 2 sets of ipod-headphone sized earbuds that are wrapped in a plastic case with two on either side and are a few centimeters apart from each other. Surround sound speaker systems have the speakers several FEET from each other most of the time. Do you really think that a couple tiny tinny-sounding weak little earbuds stuffed inside a plastic box will actually somehow manage to "simulate" surround sound? HOW? There's just no principles for it to work by, it's confirmation bias caused by the placebo effect. But on the other hand I'm sure someone will be willing to sell you a $230 pink noise CD to burn in the $500 replacement monster-cables you can stick on those "surround" headphones and they'll sound just great. At least as long as you can keep the magnets tri-polarized so they allow the interoceter to operate on a non-hertzian frequency. 2 Edited October 21, 2009 by Shadowex3 Link to comment
Hamster power Posted October 21, 2009 Content Count: 426 Joined: 09/14/09 Status: Offline Share Posted October 21, 2009 god dammit. why can't the world be simple?! Link to comment
ReGIONALS Posted October 21, 2009 Content Count: 1844 Joined: 07/27/08 Status: Offline Share Posted October 21, 2009 god dammit. why can't the world be simple?! Because not everyone has the bare minimum brain power to come up with a name like hamster_power. Link to comment
Hamster power Posted October 22, 2009 Content Count: 426 Joined: 09/14/09 Status: Offline Share Posted October 22, 2009 Because not everyone has the bare minimum brain power to come up with a name like hamster_power. Don't worry, some day you will get to that point. just keep trying and don't let people bring you down. Link to comment
Shmoked Posted October 22, 2009 Content Count: 230 Joined: 10/01/09 Status: Offline Share Posted October 22, 2009 Nice post Shadow! I was actually about to go buy them Friday!! My buddy here has them, the red light illuminates when the 5.1 is enabled, sounded really good to me when I had them on trying them out... But did that post you threw up here ever change my mind!!! I'm leaning towards Bose now... lol!! Yet again, awesome post / find!! ++ points to you! ! Link to comment
Wrathek Posted October 22, 2009 Content Count: 1839 Joined: 09/28/08 Status: Offline Share Posted October 22, 2009 negative no bose. even if the audio was suited for gaming, far too expensive. get the sennheiser hd555's Link to comment
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