Yep, buy a good stereo headphone and use software 3d like Dolby Headphone for surround sound.
This right here.
I'm personally rocking a pair of Sennheiser 598's w/ modmic and using my Xonar card too simulate the surround aspect when I play shooters and it works fantastic.
No matter where you go...there you are. ~ Buckaroo Banzai
Yep, buy a good stereo headphone and use software 3d like Dolby Headphone for surround sound.
I have decent-enough stereo headphones myself (sennheiser 518s), though they are getting a little worn.
But the only software 3d surround emulation I've tried was from razer and I could never get it working very good.
How would this work?
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Casually HardcoreOnce an Asshole. Trying to be better.Registered Userregular
Don't bother.
Good stereo mixing will beat any simulation surround software. If your surroundings allow it. Get some good open back headphones, a good DAC or soundcard, and enjoy.
You'll want to buy a soundcard that has the feature, iirc some ASUS Xonar cards have Dolby Headphone and some don't. There's also Creative cards and they have their own 3d algorithm, some like it better. FWIW, the last time I tried it, I thought it might've had better sound positioning but Dolby Headphone sounded smoother and I liked that more, I also like the ASUS software more (using 3rd party drivers right now actually).
The exact card you want comes down to a few things. How much you want to spend, internal or external, and which other features you want.
And just to put this out there, there's a lot of naysayers against software 3d. Everyone I've recommended it to, everyone I've had try it, love it. Some review sites/vlogs like Tek Syndicate simply don't know what they're talking about imo.
Here's a pretty inexpensive internal card that has Dolby Headphone.
Hey audiophiles. So I'm sad to report that my PSB M4U2s developed a crack in the headstrap. Seems in part brought on by a manufacturing defect (it's happened to a lot of folks) and my giant skull.
The good news is that Amazon have given me a complete refund! So I now have ~£200 to spend on a new set of headphones. I've been doing some serious researching over the weekend and have a short list I'm pretty comfortable with.
However a spanner was thrown into the works when I was over at a friends and tried out his little Fiio pre-amp on his M50Xs (Slabdragger sounded so huge I was literally laughing). This along with the discovery that Fiio does a DAC/amp for a measly £35 means that I have a whole new variable to consider. That being the employment of a DAC/amp.
So I have a couple of questions. Firstly which am I going to get the most improvement out of, £200 of headphones or £200 of headphones + DAC/amp?
Secondly regarding impedance. Obviously if I want to have a high impedance headset then I'll need an amp. But will sound actually be better with the amp and a high ohm headset? For example, one of the guys on my short list are the Beyerdynamic DT 770 PROs. You can actually select whether have 32, 80 or 250 Ohms. The latter seems too big for the K1, leaving me with a choice between 32 and 80. Will the sound be that much better if at all at 80 Ohms and will I doom myself to a life of only being able to use them with some sort of pre-amp?
So I have a couple of questions. Firstly which am I going to get the most improvement out of, £200 of headphones or £200 of headphones + DAC/amp?
Unhelpfully, "it depends". Some people make headphones that are easy to drive without an amp, some people don't; at the very high end of things, you will almost certainly want an amp, but UKP200 is not necessarily there yet. On the other hand, it also depends on what you're connecting them to -- if it's a phone, you may want an amp more than if it's a computer, and if it's a computer with a crappy sound subsystem in there, you probably want a DAC.
For reference, at work, I have one of the CEntrance Dacport slim's into Soundmagic HP100's, and it makes a noticeable difference over the builtin audio in a macbook pro; at home I have a "dac destroyer" (sigh) into a Massdrop O2, into Philips SHP9500 / NVX XPT100's, and again, there is a difference, though I'm not sure that I could tell the difference without swapping back and forth and listening for it. (the biggest thing I like is the fact that I now have a physical volume dial, honestly)
Looking at what you originally had, though, those are active noise cancelling headphones, and if you want to replace those with more headphones with noise cancelling, that will add on to the price of headphones to replace them, which restricts your range a bit. Do you want open / closed headphones? Portable / always-in-one-place headphones?
Having tried it noise cancelling isn't a big thing for me. Not that it doesn't work, just that I wouldn't need to use it often.
I'm going for portable, over-ear, closed headphones. So far the shortlist is (in no particular order)
Crossfade M-100
Meze 99 Classics
audio-technica MSR7GM
BERYLLIUM HP-2 ULTRALIGHT
Beyerdynamic DT 770 PRO
MrSpeakers Mad Dog 3.2
Quite a range on price from what I've found, so some of them I can easily pick up a DAC to work with them, others... not so much. From what I've read, I'm sorely tempted to get into Planar Magnetic Driver territory, but I'm not sure I can quite stretch to that at the moment. Seems that I need to be spending at least £300 to get there.
The hifiman he-400s is about as cheap as you can get for planar -- though they aren't closed-back, and I don't think they're all that portable either. I really like the Soundmagic ones I have (enough to buy a second pair for home and am going to try modding one of them to see what that gets me); they sound good, they'll fold up / come with a case so they're sort of portable; some people have had durability issues with theirs, but I've been fine so far. (but they are for some reason twice as expensive in the UK as in Canada)
I assume you've gone looking on head-fi/wirecutter/etc -- there's almost certainly info on head-fi about how well a given set of headphones works with/without being amped. The main thing I've learned from going through a few different pairs is that for me, comfort trumps everything else in the long run.
Unless you get headphones that _need_ an amp, I'd suggest getting the best headphones you can to start with, and then adding an amp later on if you feel you need one. (unless you're connecting them into something super awful to start with, in which case a cheap dac/amp will probably make a big difference).
Well I'll be using them from a Nexus 5, a laptop and a tower PC. So the range of quality on the output could vary quite a bit.
Sadly the open back thing is a no-go, I'll be using them at work a fair bit so can't really be blasting out my colleagues with blast beats.
I actually found a really great "headphones for metal music" thread on head-fi, which is where I got most of my ideas from. Seems like a really great source of knowledge.
Hm -- if you're going to be connecting to plain old motherboard audio on a desktop PC, then chances are that you'll benefit from some sort of external DAC, if just to avoid electrical interference from all the rest of the stuff inside the case; I had weird noises coming through the (front) headphone jack whenever the GPU was doing too much work, which even a really cheap external USB DAC will avoid. (heck, even the _really_ cheap ones like this will avoid that sort of interference, though they also tend to just simply stop working at all, which is a more significant failure)
Anyone have a better (cheaper yet similar audio quality) suggestion than the audioengine N22 ($200) to hook up some old passive bookshelf speakers to my PC? Put together a new PC, and while most of my use will involve headphones, the speakers in my monitor are not cutting it.
I thought about just getting a cheap stereo receiver off Craigslist but decided that's too bulky for the desk and seems overkill for my needs.
Changing tacks slightly. My wife is an ex collegiate swimmer, so every 4 years we like to watch the Olympic trials for swimming and diving. I noticed literally all the divers using some form of Beats headphones. Ignoring the fact they are obviously not audiophiles and don't really give a shit; is it likely they were given those headphones as promotional products? Everytime I saw a competitor wearing a pair, I cringed.
Beats was giving away headphones to every athletes they could meet at the last Olympics. Which is against the Olympic committee rules, as the IOC wants a cut of everything, but Beats skirted the whole IOC by having a ton of reps "accidentally" bump into athletes with free headphones in hand.
So, some of you may remember I made a post about advice on acoustic treatment for a room I was renovating. It must have been about a year since that post, but it's finally done!
...Mostly. Okay, there's still a bunch of other stuff I want to do??? But, for the most part! The difficult stuff is done, and the rest should be smooth sailing from there (hopefully). Before pictures are on page 54 if anyone is interested in what that looked like. Thanks for the help, guys! You're all invited over.
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Casually HardcoreOnce an Asshole. Trying to be better.Registered Userregular
Thanks! I ended up talking to a couple of acoustic engineers who told me that whatever I did I would want to make the entire room symmetrical, so there are matching panels on the opposite wall (not pictured) and spot panels where the windows would be.
I didn't do anything to the ceiling because I really didn't feel like reinforcing the drop ceiling grid to support the weight of additional baffles and I also can't put insulation above the tiles because the space above is very low... so unfortunately that's untreated right now. In the future when we replace the drop ceiling tiles to the kind you see by the projector in picture two I might just throw up some cheap acoustic drop ceiling tiles around the ceiling perimeter. The big bass traps in the front corners are basically because I didn't feel like going through with deadening the entire front wall like it was initially suggested to me.
They also suggested freestanding baffles in front of the windows or acoustic curtains, but every acoustic curtain I looked at I haaaaaated, so I made a call and went with the plantation shutters because I wanted the room to look like something I wanted to be in and not have something I disliked for whatever minimal enhancements it would make to the room acoustics.
I haven't run an SPL meter to test levels or anything, but there is an IMMEDIATE difference in sound when you walk into the room. The speakers sound 100% better in that room than they ever had and the sound staging is a lot more prominent. Funny thing though-- now that the bass is a lot better in this room, I miss the presence of a subwoofer? It's definitely the next thing I want to add and I've already pre-wired for it.
I wish! We were only really able to do the room because of discounts and a lot of saving. It'll probably take a good bit of time until we're able to do rears and a sub, unfortunately. But yeah, I think a 12" will probably be pretty nice in the long run. Didn't wire for a second, although that wouldn't be a whole lot of trouble.
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Donovan PuppyfuckerA dagger in the dark isworth a thousand swords in the morningRegistered Userregular
Can't afford em yet, unfortunately. I kind of had a choice between getting the rears and sub before the screen and projector, but if I did that I would have a complete speaker setup but we'd have to leave the room sitting unfinished for however long it took us to save back up for the screen and projector. And I've personally been pretty happy with the 3.0 setup, so waiting on the remaining 2.1 doesn't hurt too bad.
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
I think I recall Stereophile reviewing an earlier version of the Gotham, but the review may have been for a pair of them. That's a lot of bass and a lot of money.
Donovan PuppyfuckerA dagger in the dark isworth a thousand swords in the morningRegistered Userregular
Shit, those things are fifteen grand.
For under $3200, I can get a JBL 5628. Granted, I still need an amp (maybe one of these? I'm not sure) to drive said subwoofer cabinet, but it can handle enough power to blow that weeny little "Gotham" clear out of the room...
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
Well it looks like they both run about 4500w RMS, so they probably sound close? The Gotham series does carry a premium though, that's for sure. I want to see a home theater that requires a 4500w subwoofer.
So....can anyone please talk me out of buying a pair of HD650s?
Um, I guess when new the clamping force is a little tight, they basically require amping, and they're quite dark/lush lacking the sparkle of the equivalent Audio Technica models. I'm not a fan of the cable but there are replacements for around $200.
I've been using a set daily since 2009 and love them. I've tried a few other headphones but always end up going back to my 650's after a little bit. A few months back I replaced all of the padding and they're like new again.
You should be able to pick up a used pair for under $300 from head-fi if you're comfortable going that route.
amazon UK has them for UKP 233, which will then be minus 17% because no VAT; using the white house as a delivery address, it comes out as UKP 210.40 with shipping, which is USD 277 overall for new ones. Not sure about import duties and stuff, but still worth considering compared to amazon US's price.
(I'm in Canada, and hd600's are similarly much cheaper from the UK than from canada for some reason -- I just need to convince myself that the upgrade is worthwhile; I have SHP9500's right now and they're very much good enough, I just know that there is still a place to upgrade to)
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Casually HardcoreOnce an Asshole. Trying to be better.Registered Userregular
amazon UK has them for UKP 233, which will then be minus 17% because no VAT; using the white house as a delivery address, it comes out as UKP 210.40 with shipping, which is USD 277 overall for new ones. Not sure about import duties and stuff, but still worth considering compared to amazon US's price.
(I'm in Canada, and hd600's are similarly much cheaper from the UK than from canada for some reason -- I just need to convince myself that the upgrade is worthwhile; I have SHP9500's right now and they're very much good enough, I just know that there is still a place to upgrade to)
So I was going to recommend the AKG 702 65th Anniversary, since I have a pair and they are awesome, but it looks like unless you want to pay $1,000+ for a new pair, you'd have to buy them used.
All I can say is, holy crap! Glad I bought them for $400 when I did!
So we get stiff once in a while. So we have a little fun. What’s wrong with that? This is a free country, isn’t it? I can take my panda any place I want to. And if I wanna buy it a drink, that’s my business.
HD650s -- they are now showing up as 'currently unavailable', which is weird because I have them in my shopping cart from earlier? As for pricing, the HD600s are just generally speaking cheaper in the UK, for some reason:
In 2012, AKG released the 65th anniversary edition of their K702 to instant acclaim. Built with a bass boost, improved comfort, and matched transducers, the limited edition K702 became a legend in the audiophile community for its sound and build quality. Following the success of the Q701 drop in June, we asked AKG if we could configure our own edition of the K702 65th, and they agreed based on their faith in the Massdrop community. Configured by Massdrop, manufactured by AKG, and made possible by you, the AKG K7XX Massdrop Limited Edition Headphones bring you rare sound at an even rarer price.
(the difference being it says Massdrop on some bits of them, but otherwise I think they're identical; the current drop ends in a day, but they show up every few months for the same price)
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Casually HardcoreOnce an Asshole. Trying to be better.Registered Userregular
Man, I've been wanting AKG K701 for a long long time and seeing that Massdrop forced my hand to buy them. Hopefully, my soundcard is enough to drive them (which I highly doubt).
In 2012, AKG released the 65th anniversary edition of their K702 to instant acclaim. Built with a bass boost, improved comfort, and matched transducers, the limited edition K702 became a legend in the audiophile community for its sound and build quality. Following the success of the Q701 drop in June, we asked AKG if we could configure our own edition of the K702 65th, and they agreed based on their faith in the Massdrop community. Configured by Massdrop, manufactured by AKG, and made possible by you, the AKG K7XX Massdrop Limited Edition Headphones bring you rare sound at an even rarer price.
(the difference being it says Massdrop on some bits of them, but otherwise I think they're identical; the current drop ends in a day, but they show up every few months for the same price)
So we get stiff once in a while. So we have a little fun. What’s wrong with that? This is a free country, isn’t it? I can take my panda any place I want to. And if I wanna buy it a drink, that’s my business.
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Donovan PuppyfuckerA dagger in the dark isworth a thousand swords in the morningRegistered Userregular
Well it looks like they both run about 4500w RMS, so they probably sound close? The Gotham series does carry a premium though, that's for sure. I want to see a home theater that requires a 4500w subwoofer.
A similar claimed power handling capability doesn't really suggest much similarity at all. I would suspect that the home cinema unit would probably sound cleaner in a direct comparison inside a house - to use popular terminology the bass would be "tighter". In a full size cinema though, it would disappear into the background. The cinema unit puts out 135 dB @ 1m, that's certainly not to be sneezed at...
Soooooo, which amp/dac should I consider for those Massdrops?
I am going to be using only at my desktop for listening/studio. I have an old M-AUDIO Firewire 410 that should power but ehhhh I don't know that it's output quality is all that great. Time to finally replace maybe. Perhaps I should replace that unit for my studio, ProFire 610 or something.
Well, if you're already on massdrop, they have a pretty decent O2 that, like most of their audio stuff, should comes around again; right now, the DACPort slim that they're selling is a pretty decent dac + amp in one. They have a gazillion other options, though, those are just the two that I happen to have -- I don't know how they compare to the other options out there. (for instance, the schitt magni/modi pairing is very popular)
Posts
This right here.
I'm personally rocking a pair of Sennheiser 598's w/ modmic and using my Xonar card too simulate the surround aspect when I play shooters and it works fantastic.
~ Buckaroo Banzai
I have decent-enough stereo headphones myself (sennheiser 518s), though they are getting a little worn.
But the only software 3d surround emulation I've tried was from razer and I could never get it working very good.
How would this work?
Good stereo mixing will beat any simulation surround software. If your surroundings allow it. Get some good open back headphones, a good DAC or soundcard, and enjoy.
The exact card you want comes down to a few things. How much you want to spend, internal or external, and which other features you want.
And just to put this out there, there's a lot of naysayers against software 3d. Everyone I've recommended it to, everyone I've had try it, love it. Some review sites/vlogs like Tek Syndicate simply don't know what they're talking about imo.
Here's a pretty inexpensive internal card that has Dolby Headphone.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16829132020&cm_re=xonar-_-29-132-020-_-Product
If you end up going that route I think I have a post I can dig up that will explain some of the settings.
The good news is that Amazon have given me a complete refund! So I now have ~£200 to spend on a new set of headphones. I've been doing some serious researching over the weekend and have a short list I'm pretty comfortable with.
However a spanner was thrown into the works when I was over at a friends and tried out his little Fiio pre-amp on his M50Xs (Slabdragger sounded so huge I was literally laughing). This along with the discovery that Fiio does a DAC/amp for a measly £35 means that I have a whole new variable to consider. That being the employment of a DAC/amp.
So I have a couple of questions. Firstly which am I going to get the most improvement out of, £200 of headphones or £200 of headphones + DAC/amp?
Secondly regarding impedance. Obviously if I want to have a high impedance headset then I'll need an amp. But will sound actually be better with the amp and a high ohm headset? For example, one of the guys on my short list are the Beyerdynamic DT 770 PROs. You can actually select whether have 32, 80 or 250 Ohms. The latter seems too big for the K1, leaving me with a choice between 32 and 80. Will the sound be that much better if at all at 80 Ohms and will I doom myself to a life of only being able to use them with some sort of pre-amp?
http://steamcommunity.com/id/pablocampy
Unhelpfully, "it depends". Some people make headphones that are easy to drive without an amp, some people don't; at the very high end of things, you will almost certainly want an amp, but UKP200 is not necessarily there yet. On the other hand, it also depends on what you're connecting them to -- if it's a phone, you may want an amp more than if it's a computer, and if it's a computer with a crappy sound subsystem in there, you probably want a DAC.
For reference, at work, I have one of the CEntrance Dacport slim's into Soundmagic HP100's, and it makes a noticeable difference over the builtin audio in a macbook pro; at home I have a "dac destroyer" (sigh) into a Massdrop O2, into Philips SHP9500 / NVX XPT100's, and again, there is a difference, though I'm not sure that I could tell the difference without swapping back and forth and listening for it. (the biggest thing I like is the fact that I now have a physical volume dial, honestly)
Looking at what you originally had, though, those are active noise cancelling headphones, and if you want to replace those with more headphones with noise cancelling, that will add on to the price of headphones to replace them, which restricts your range a bit. Do you want open / closed headphones? Portable / always-in-one-place headphones?
I'm going for portable, over-ear, closed headphones. So far the shortlist is (in no particular order)
Crossfade M-100
Meze 99 Classics
audio-technica MSR7GM
BERYLLIUM HP-2 ULTRALIGHT
Beyerdynamic DT 770 PRO
MrSpeakers Mad Dog 3.2
Quite a range on price from what I've found, so some of them I can easily pick up a DAC to work with them, others... not so much. From what I've read, I'm sorely tempted to get into Planar Magnetic Driver territory, but I'm not sure I can quite stretch to that at the moment. Seems that I need to be spending at least £300 to get there.
http://steamcommunity.com/id/pablocampy
I assume you've gone looking on head-fi/wirecutter/etc -- there's almost certainly info on head-fi about how well a given set of headphones works with/without being amped. The main thing I've learned from going through a few different pairs is that for me, comfort trumps everything else in the long run.
Unless you get headphones that _need_ an amp, I'd suggest getting the best headphones you can to start with, and then adding an amp later on if you feel you need one. (unless you're connecting them into something super awful to start with, in which case a cheap dac/amp will probably make a big difference).
Sadly the open back thing is a no-go, I'll be using them at work a fair bit so can't really be blasting out my colleagues with blast beats.
I actually found a really great "headphones for metal music" thread on head-fi, which is where I got most of my ideas from. Seems like a really great source of knowledge.
Thanks for the advice!
http://steamcommunity.com/id/pablocampy
I thought about just getting a cheap stereo receiver off Craigslist but decided that's too bulky for the desk and seems overkill for my needs.
...Mostly. Okay, there's still a bunch of other stuff I want to do??? But, for the most part! The difficult stuff is done, and the rest should be smooth sailing from there (hopefully). Before pictures are on page 54 if anyone is interested in what that looked like. Thanks for the help, guys! You're all invited over.
How does those sound baffles works?
I didn't do anything to the ceiling because I really didn't feel like reinforcing the drop ceiling grid to support the weight of additional baffles and I also can't put insulation above the tiles because the space above is very low... so unfortunately that's untreated right now. In the future when we replace the drop ceiling tiles to the kind you see by the projector in picture two I might just throw up some cheap acoustic drop ceiling tiles around the ceiling perimeter. The big bass traps in the front corners are basically because I didn't feel like going through with deadening the entire front wall like it was initially suggested to me.
They also suggested freestanding baffles in front of the windows or acoustic curtains, but every acoustic curtain I looked at I haaaaaated, so I made a call and went with the plantation shutters because I wanted the room to look like something I wanted to be in and not have something I disliked for whatever minimal enhancements it would make to the room acoustics.
I haven't run an SPL meter to test levels or anything, but there is an IMMEDIATE difference in sound when you walk into the room. The speakers sound 100% better in that room than they ever had and the sound staging is a lot more prominent. Funny thing though-- now that the bass is a lot better in this room, I miss the presence of a subwoofer? It's definitely the next thing I want to add and I've already pre-wired for it.
http://www.jlaudio.com/g213v2-gloss-home-audio-gotham-powered-subwoofers-96240
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
/click
...Oh.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
For under $3200, I can get a JBL 5628. Granted, I still need an amp (maybe one of these? I'm not sure) to drive said subwoofer cabinet, but it can handle enough power to blow that weeny little "Gotham" clear out of the room...
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000092TT0/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
and they're enough to shake down my house.
So....can anyone please talk me out of buying a pair of HD650s?
The subwoofer that came with my soundbar does a decent job. You really don't need a ton in most situations.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Um, I guess when new the clamping force is a little tight, they basically require amping, and they're quite dark/lush lacking the sparkle of the equivalent Audio Technica models. I'm not a fan of the cable but there are replacements for around $200.
You should be able to pick up a used pair for under $300 from head-fi if you're comfortable going that route.
(I'm in Canada, and hd600's are similarly much cheaper from the UK than from canada for some reason -- I just need to convince myself that the upgrade is worthwhile; I have SHP9500's right now and they're very much good enough, I just know that there is still a place to upgrade to)
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKK
Buying from Amazon UK will cost me $288.90 which is cheaper than buying a used paired here in the US. Is this the normal UK price?
All I can say is, holy crap! Glad I bought them for $400 when I did!
http://uk.camelcamelcamel.com/Sennheiser-HD-600-Monitoring-Headphones/product/B00004SY4H?context=browse
shows them having been as low as UKP182 at one point.
For the AKG K7.. series, Massdrop has those for USD199 right now: (the difference being it says Massdrop on some bits of them, but otherwise I think they're identical; the current drop ends in a day, but they show up every few months for the same price)
Ooooooo ahhhhhh!
That's a great deal!
A similar claimed power handling capability doesn't really suggest much similarity at all. I would suspect that the home cinema unit would probably sound cleaner in a direct comparison inside a house - to use popular terminology the bass would be "tighter". In a full size cinema though, it would disappear into the background. The cinema unit puts out 135 dB @ 1m, that's certainly not to be sneezed at...
I am going to be using only at my desktop for listening/studio. I have an old M-AUDIO Firewire 410 that should power but ehhhh I don't know that it's output quality is all that great. Time to finally replace maybe. Perhaps I should replace that unit for my studio, ProFire 610 or something.