- I've found Dolby Headphone hit and miss with the DR150's - you suggest that it might be better with the K702's. I assume that if I upgrade the soundcard at some point that the K702's are still a sound (pardon the pun!) choice?
Accuracy of reproduction makes it or breaks it for binaural sound.
Same signal which with good headphones gives good sense of distance besides direction, becomes "head in bucket underwater" immersion with bad headphones.
And bad signal for headphones, like stereo speaker mix, still has sounds very accurately positioned inside left/right ear, or in center of head even with the most accurate sound headphone.
Because without binaural cues brain simply doesn't know where else to position sounds.
It's kinda of symbiotic relationship.
But with good headphones and good binaural sound simulation, next step up would be game showing locations of sound sources in on screen map.
Which would be slower than just locating sounds by listening...
Of course if your head shape differs more from average, then none of current sound cards can give best immersion.
Because its shape of head which causes direction dependant changes to signal received by both ears from sound source.
Your brain has simply learned to decode those personal binaural cues.
Ah...so, that might be an issue. My speakers have a 'headphone' socket but is that just introducing additional components in which is going to degrade the sound? Also - to what extent would Dolby Headphone be propagated via the speakers headphone socket? As usual - apologies if these are daft questions
If headphone output is just pass through, then there shouldn't be much things which could degrade signal.
And if headphone output comes through amplifier, then it's up to its quality.
Xonar D1 is one of those lame Asus cards with 100 ohm output impedance, so using case front connector might give better sound than card's rear connector.
IIRC that front connector header of card didn't have that lame output resistor.
