Sound Spec & Headphones

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Soldato
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27 Jun 2006
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I've been running a Creative Soundblaster PCI, through a £20 pair of speakers from a famous catalogue shop - brought into my head via my Ipod earphones.

And I'm hoping to upgrade things from that - when I finally do piece my rig together (waiting on the wonderful Conroe).

I believe I've already got most of it together, although I do admit I know as much about sound, as I do about the Japanese language. So if my choice of speakers are going to compromise my soundcard quality and so on, please do give me a shout.

Everything is far from top of the range - but I want a decent sound system and hopefully an improvement on what I currently have - these will be used primarily for music and gaming.

Sound Card:

Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Music - OEM (SC-043-CL) - £56.99

Speakers:

Creative Inspire 5.1 P5800 Speakers - OEM (SP-043-CL) - £41.07

Total: £98.06

And lastly, I need headphones. I recently bought a pair of wireless Philips headphones and they were quickly returned for cash. I didn't like them at all - first of all because you had to tune in the frequency and if you moved your head from non-still, it started going all crackly and so on.

They were also absolutely massive and this is actual footage, before and after purchase.

headphonesrm5.png


My budget would be around £50 - and the ones I liked the look of were:

Creative HQ-2300D 5.1 Headphones - Retail (SP-071-CL) - £53.99

As you can see - I'm on some sort of quest in making Creative richer.

Anyway, that's about it really. Apologies about the crude drawing.
 
I don't think you'll get much advantage if you pair that speakers set with the X-fi. My reccomendation is to spend a larger portion of the budget on speakers and less on the soundcard. It is quite difficult to find a good surround set for around £80 though. If you could strech to something like the Logitech Z-5400 set, it will sound a lot better. Couple this with a second hand Audigy 2 card (I have one and use it with Hi-Fi equiptment and it doesn't sound bad at all, can be bought for £20 or less).

Alternatively, is 2.1 sound any good for you? The Acoustic Energy Aego M 2.1 would fall nicely into the budget and are highly reccomended. This would not be as effective for gaming, but should be much better for music.

However, you also want headphones. Generally, 5.1 headphones arn't well thought of (though I cannot vouch for this myself). I would reccomend a good set of stereo headphones and mabye use these as your music listening system with the 5.1 speakers for gaming. Don't know much about headphones, but £50 will get you a good stereo pair, look at Sennhieser models possibly.
 
Never used those Creative headphones, but I have owned the Medusa and Zalman 5.1 headsets and found them dissapointing. Poor sound quality, poor surround sound.

Also £50 will get you some genuinely decent stereo headphones from someone like Sennheiser. In fact you can get great sounding stereo headphones for under £25 (sennheiser px100, koss porta pro etc).

I agree with Dr EM about speaker choices, Aego M should sound much better than the P5800 if you can live without surround sound. The cheap creative speakers tend to be poor. If you need 5.1 and you only have £50 to spend on them, have a look at the Logitech X530.
 
Cheers for the advice.

I was hoping to squeeze a soundcard, speakers, headphones and a keyboard into a £200 budget - but that has all changed now.

I bought the keyboard today along with a few other bits and pieces for the new rig - so the sound will be a less prioritized, but I'll probably be able to spend a bit more on it when it comes around.

Would it help if I made the soundcard, headphones and speakers from a £200 budget or am I looking at considerably more?

I'm not sure whether I would want to pump anymore than that into the sound element of things - as I have a good few other things to get.
 
£200 for sound should be no problem, consider:

Logitech Z-5400 £143
Audigy 2, under £20 second hand
Leaves £37 for a set of headphones, could get a very nice stereo set for that :)
 
I got the 2300D from OCUK a couple of months ago, and I have to be honest I thought the headphones were rubbish. I could not get a good fit with them, and the sound quality was average at best. What was good however was the external decoder that comes with them. It decodes DTS / Dolby digital and ProLogic2, and has Dolby Headphone. used with my audigy2 (notebook) and my Sennheisers (HD650s) it was worth the purchase just for that. For watching DVDs etc, and even playing games, the Dolby Headphone is brilliant, and give a pretty good impression of surround sound through stereo headpones. I use it all the time on my laptop now when travelling around.

As to speaker choices, I did not like the Creative inspire speakers at all, and they are currently gathering dust in favour of 2 channel stereo speakers. The logitech ones mentioned elsewhere are suposed to be pretty good tough.

Headphones wise , unless you want the decoder, avoid the creative headphones and get one of the Sennheiser range (PC150 are great).
 
For gaming, I would suggest keeping the X-Fi in your spec. I recently changed from an Audigy 2 to an X-Fi and I'm finding it a significant improvement. The most startling improvement is with headphones, especially the CMSS3D-Headphones feature that I was expecting to be hype. It fakes surround sound on stereo headphones...and it actually works. It gives much better surround sound than the "real" surround sound on my Medusa "5.1" headphones.
 
Angilion said:
For gaming, I would suggest keeping the X-Fi in your spec. I recently changed from an Audigy 2 to an X-Fi and I'm finding it a significant improvement. The most startling improvement is with headphones, especially the CMSS3D-Headphones feature that I was expecting to be hype. It fakes surround sound on stereo headphones...and it actually works. It gives much better surround sound than the "real" surround sound on my Medusa "5.1" headphones.
Click to expand...

It still works even when set to 5.1 speakers with my headphones plugged into my Z-5500's.
 
I went for the X-fi - works very well and am pleased with it.

prod14659_hdr_1_6_1.jpg


Just a quck question in regards to the upgrade kit you can buy (pictured) - Is it worth it?

Ideally I want to run both speakers and headphones off this rig at some stage - would the front panel give me the option for the headphones and the back option give me an option for the speakers? Or is not as simple as that?
 
In regards to speakers - are the Creative I-Trigue 5.1 5600 Speakers any good?

I'm not overly wild on their styling but they seem a bit better than the lower budget versions. I was just wondering if anyone had them and could give me an opinion.

Cheers.
 
If you need 5.1 at that sort of budget, I believe they are a good choice. Don't have them myself though.

If you just need to run headphones simultaneously with speakers, you don't need that drive kit. You should have a headphone socket on your case, just wire this to the soundcards on-board connectors. You can use both at once no problems.
 
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