USB sound cards

Anyone got a suggestion for an external USB sound card? I'm looking at the sound blaster G5.

 

Sennheiser GSX-1000.

 

@OP what to you intend to use it for?

Best virtual surround processing ATM, but really overpriced with an underpowered headphone amp and lack of connectivity.

 

I personally am happy with PCM2704. Amp is recommended, though.

 

With what headphones will you be using it?

 

Well, to the OP, I can recommend the Xonar U7, it's driving my AKG K702 headphones to perfection as far as I'm concerned. I've tried plugging my headphones into the headphone jack on my motherboard & it sounds like sh*t (muddy) in comparison to driving it from the Xonar U7. The Xonar U7 is a bit finicky with drivers though, make sure you're not using the latest beta driver, instead use the latest non-beta driver. Also, ensure you've selected 24bit audio, it sounds loads better on 24 bit rather than 16bit, even if your sound sources aren't recorded in 24 bit. I don't think you need to worry about sound cards unless you have a good headphones though, there's always a weakest link in the chain. Also ensure that the Xonar U7 sound drivers are the last sound device driver you install, because upgrading the motherboard sound drivers afterwards can end up making the Xonar U7 sound like sh*t, always upgrade Xonar U7 sound drivers last.

Step 1: make sure you have awesome headphones: preferably 'reference' audophile headphones (i.e. flat response, no Beats bass enhanced nonsense).

Step 2: make sure you DAC can drive your headphones in terms of impedance. I do recommend an external DAC / USB sound card - that's been my best audio experience on PC.

This setup really helped in multiplayer online shooter gaming in terms of recognising subtle sound cues as well as sound positioning. A competitive advantage. Also for music listening this setup allowed me to hear things in my favourite tracks that I'd never experienced before - nuances of breath of voice & seperation of instruments & backing vocals so I could clearly hear the character of each instrument & seperate voice in the track - as opposed to a 'sound mass'.

I chose the Xonar U7 after doing a reasonable amount of online research (back in about 2014) as well as reading this Guru3D article: http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/asus-xonar-u7-review,1.html

(extra tip: don't use any surround sound or environmental sound processing nonsense on the Xonar U7 (no Dolby bollocks or anything like that!), nor on any other product for that matter, it's rubbish approximated rubbish, use pure unadulterated stereo sound instead!)

 

I have some razer kraken pro with a 32ohm impedence.

Sent from my SM-T560NU using Tapatalk

 

To be honest I don't think it matters what you use those things with, they're a 'gaming' headset with only 32 ohm impedence, so should be easy to drive. And given they're a gaming headset rather than audiophile headset I don't think there's anything to be gained from driving them from a special sound card. I'd just plug them into the motherboard. If you want accurate sound, then you'd want audiophile headphones, in my view 'gaming headphones' are a non-starter, good headphones are all that matter and that helps gaming & music, but gaming headphones are just....poor, gimmicky, and ultimately disappointing. Sorry, but the gaming moniker just drives me nuts when it's applied to all peripherals, it doesn't have proper business being applied to all & sundry! I'd say be happy & just plug them into your motherboard given the headphones you have.

 

Good virtual surround (such as Senn GSX 1000) is a competitive advantage in FPS games that's don't have built-in binaural audio. You can't soundwhore with hard panning left-right stereo because that's not enough positional info to differentiate between sounds in front of and behind you.

TL;DR Razer headphones don't have good enough sound quality to benefit from anything better than onboard audio.

 

OK, so there's no point in buying this:

https://www.mwave.com.au/product/creative-sound-blasterx-g5-gaming-soundcard-ac08049

if i was only using them for a 32 ohm headset?

 

No point, especially for a Razer headset.

 

What's a good combo to make it worth the while?

Sent from my SM-N910G using Tapatalk

 

A higher quality set of cans, for starters. Meaning, not a gaming headset.

 

OK, thanks for that

might get a new pc mouse instead

 

I find I can detect noises behind me when playing Titanfall with stereo headphones - I often find myself swivelling 180 degrees to the noise of a cloaking or de-cloaking pilot. I think games themselves can sometimes do the sound processing to enable distinguishing between front & back sounds, so I don't think you need a surround set of headphones (nor a surround sound amplifier) to do the processing for you.

 

Does Titanfall have a headphone mode that uses actual HRTFs, or is it just plain stereo with a crossfeed or a different mix than the speakers mode? Because I've seen a lot of people say they can pinpoint sounds in stereo, but when they close their eyes, they really can't.

 

Por que no los dos?

 

I do not know, I just know I pin point sounds all the time based on sound cues using stereo headphones - and normally I have my eyes open when I'm playing video games, so... ;-) Ha!

 

The real test is whether you can, for example, accurately locate a gun being fired at 1 o'clock and a grenade going off at 4 o'clock, without cheating with the eyes.

 

Yeah, I don't just do 180's to sounds, I do 90's and I guess 50's and 130's too!

 

LOL. With my K7XX and GSX 1000 + Magni combo I wallbang people in Insurgency and Day of Infamy and get hackusated all the time.

 

We're good!

 

HTRF is how your brain determines location of a sound based on the time difference between the sound travelling to both ears. so you can still determine location stereo headphones because you only have 2 years...otherwise we would have more ears

 

You can get really good positional audio from a pair of stereo headphones, but the HRTFs have to be mixed into that signal, otherwise all you're getting is left and right. No front, back, above, or below. With headphones, each ear hears a discrete audio channel, unlike speakers which have natural cross feed (left ear hears a little of the right channel and vice-versa).

 

Here's a source where I just learned what HTRF is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-related_transfer_function

It's basically how the physical construct of the head and ears influences the sound that is being received by the inner ear depending on the direction the sound is coming from, which enables the person to differentiate between sound in front or sound behind, as well as above & below - left to right is a bit easier for headphones to achieve, but the sound has to be processed by the game to simulate the influence of the 'physical construct of the head' on the sound to help locate behind & in front (and I guess above & below).

What I don't understand is how the GSX 1000 surround sound amplifier works? In order for the surround sound amplifier to function & approximate the influence of the 'physical construct of the head' on the incoming sounds it would need to know the location of the sounds from within the game, and it wouldn't be able to know that unless it was receiving 7.1 (or I guess 5.1) surround sound from the game itself. If it wasn't receiving 7.1/5.1 from the game & then breaking it down into simulated 2 channel, then it wouldn't be able to do it's thing - then it would be just up to the game to make the approximations to allow for pinpointing of sound in space, in which case there would be no need for the GSX 1000 surround sound amplifier in the first place. In my view, the function of the GSX 1000 is reliant on being able to select 7.1 or 5.1 surround sound in the game - am I right?

EDIT: and just found this source, where they are really quite negative about the accuracy & possibility of being able to produce surround sound in headphones:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/how-we-test-gaming-headsets,review-34136-2.html
They effectively say it's not possible/reliable, although I don't fully agree with them, because I spatially locate sounds in Titanfall using just stereo headphones.

 

The great thing about the GSX 1000 is that it's driver-less. You plug it in, Windows sees it as a 7.1 playback device, and you get virtual surround in all your games that have surround sound support.

 

So, in that case, when you run your game you have to select 7.1 sound option in the in-game sound menus? Otherwise you wouldn't get simulated surround sound from your GSX 1000. So that aspect will only work in games where you can select 7.1 channel sound output. (How does the GSX 1000 know if it's receiving 7.1/5.1 or any other sound format, does it know?)

 

Games that don't let you choose a speaker configuration or playback device, go by the speaker configuration of the default playback device in Windows.

 

Yep, but my point was also the one I mentioned in my 'long' post above, where I said:

"In order for the surround sound amplifier [GSX 1000] to function & approximate the influence of the 'physical construct of the head' on the incoming sounds it would need to know the location of the sounds from within the game, and it wouldn't be able to know that unless it was receiving 7.1 (or I guess 5.1) surround sound from the game itself. If it wasn't receiving 7.1/5.1 from the game & then breaking it down into simulated 2 channel, then it wouldn't be able to do it's thing - then it would be just up to the game to make the approximations to allow for pinpointing of sound in space, in which case there would be no need for the GSX 1000 surround sound amplifier in the first place."

The GSX 1000 will only give you positional audio if you can select 7.1/5.1/surround sound in the game menus themselves. Otherwise it cannot possibly know the 'position' of the sound from the game.

 

I edited my post after you quoted it.

That's exactly what the GSX 1000 does. It takes a signal from the game intended for surround speakers, processes it, and outputs a 2-channel stream to your stereo headphones with the positional cues intact. Shouldn't be difficult to understand. Like I said, games that don't let you select the playback device/speaker configuration in their options menu, use the default playback device/speaker configuration in Windows. Assuming the game supports surround sound in the first place and the GSX 1000 is selected as the default playback device in Windows, there's nothing more you need to configure.

 

Yes, GSX 1000 will only give you positional audio in games that support surround sound in it's various forms (5.1/7.1, etc), otherwise it's only as good as a set of stereo headphones. I believe some games will process the positional sound anyway when you choose headphones in the game settings, so I think it's possible to get positional audio from regular headphone setup in those situations. It seems that way in Titanfall in my experience. (Titanfall sound files are a massive part of the download size, I remember reading that they did that to minimise CPU overhead, perhaps their massive size/complexity is testimony to Titanfall having good positional audio - a little theory!)

 

@yrekabakery , just stumbled upon Windows Sonic by accident just now, which is a setting in Windows 10, described as follows:

"The “Turn on 7.1 virtual surround sound” (Windows) or “Use virtual surround in apps” (Xbox) checkbox allows all existing applications that were capable of rendering to 5.1 or 7.1 channel formats to now treat headphones as a virtual 7.1 device. Content that previously would have only been heard in multichannel via a multichannel home theater, and which would have utilized a linear downmix over headphones, can now be virtualized (using the format specified in the dropdown) and heard over any pair of stereo headphones."

I've enabled it just now, so I'm gonna turn on 5.1/7.1 sound settings in the Titanfall game menu when I play the game, and then I'll see if I think positional audio is better. This is essentially the software equivalent of what you GSX 1000 is doing: taking a 5.1/7.1 sound stream from the game & turning it into 2 channel positional audio.


And here for description of this Windows feature:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/mt807491(v=vs.85).aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396

And here they talk about this new Windows feature in this thread:
https://www.head-fi.org/threads/win...7-1-virtualization-in-creators-update.845461/

 

All modern AAA games, especially multiplat titles, support surround sound in-engine. It's not an issue unless you go back 10-15 years to pre-Vista when some PC games required EAX in order to enable surround sound, otherwise they would only output stereo.

Titanfall had massive uncompressed sound files so the CPU usage from having to decompress them would be saved. If anything, doing HRTF processing in software increases CPU overhead. Titanfall isn't doing anything special in the engine for headphones. 'Headphone' mode in Titanfall, like in other Source games, is still just stereo, with a slightly different mix of the rear channels than '2 Speakers' but otherwise sounds basically identical.

Vast majority of games that have surround sound, only support it for speakers. It's rare to find games that have a built-in HRTF mode, which is why the GSX 1000 is very useful for headphone users. Off the top of my head, I know Overwatch has Dolby Atmos for Headphones, which is straight-up garbage and far worse than the GSX 1000 or even other lesser VSS solutions like SBX or DH. CS:GO added a 'Headphones with HRTF' speaker configuration last year, which is not only very good, it takes things a step beyond virtual 2D (5.1/7.1) surround into 3D audio, meaning elevation (above/below) is added to the mix. BF3 has 'Enhanced Stereo Mode' which sounds pretty good, mostly because the Frostbite sound engine is stellar to begin with, but is still only a stereo crossfeed. And then you get into the arcane world of old games and OpenAL wrappers.

Yeah I know about that. Windows 7 had a similar option. It artificially widens and shifts the soundstage in front of you and adds some crossfeed and reverb, but that playback device is still stereo (click 'Configure') so it's not virtual surround. That Head-Fi thread mentions this several times. It's just virtualizing a stereo source, like if you were to feed a stereo instead of 5.1/7.1 signal to the GSX 1000. Also, I recall that Dolby Atmos for headphones in Windows requires a license to enable and only works in the Dolby Windows Store app, otherwise it's not doing anything.

How did this thread about USB sounds cards inevitably veer into a discussion of DSPs? LOL

 

Yes, it still shows 2-channel in Playback devices, but that flies in the face of what Microsoft specifically say about Windows Sonic & 7.1 virtualised, namely: "allows all existing applications that were capable of rendering to 5.1 or 7.1 channel formats to now treat headphones as a virtual 7.1 device", so I'm not sold on it being seen as a pure 2 channel device. I enabled the 7.1 channel audio in Titanfall, and had to turn up the volume by a factor of 3! Haven't tested it in game yet, will update this post after testing now.

 

As long as the playback device is still 2-channel, doesn't matter what MS says, VSS is not functioning.

Yeah that volume drop is normal when combining center and surround channels to L/R in the downmix to stereo (not HRTF), well that and possibly missing sounds.

Anyway I'm going to sleep now, so have fun.

 

so worth getting the GSX 1000 or 1200? even with razer headphones?

 

Enabling Windows Sonic 7.1 virtualised, and setting Titanfall to 7.1 sound resulted in an OK experience, but I don't think sound positioning was any better than having straight up normal 2 channel headphone mode. I switched back to 2 channel headphone mode & sound quality is better and I also like the positional audio better.

 

Maybe for the positional audio, if it really does work like it's supposed to. I'm a bit sceptical about virtualised surround sound solutions. As you can see from my post above this one, Windows Sonic 7.1 virtualised I did not like at all. Maybe look at some reviews for the GSX 1000, is it worth the high price, and does it truly offer better positional sound in games - I doubt it, at least not until I try it!

 

I have dolby atmos for headphones active but in some cases it's hard to tell if it's working as it should.

some videos are saying it's good for low impedence headsets.

 

I've read about 5 reviews of the GSX 1000, as well as reading Amazon user reviews, and generally people are unimpressed by the sound quality of the GSX 1000, with many preferring more detailed sound from some onboard audio solutions as well as other sound cards. People are generally impressed with the surround sound though, it gets quoted as being the best surround sound experience people have had.

 

Not until you get better headphones. But then you run into the conundrum that it may not adequately drive a more demanding pair of audiophile cans, because the GSX 1000 is extremely unimpressive for the price as a DAC and headphone amp for listening to music in stereo. You could buy a Schiit stack, or almost get a Creative X7, instead. With the GSX 1000, you're paying through the nose for a very good virtual surround DSP, that's the main selling point. It's for virtualizing surround in games/movies on headphones. So if you're not a competitive FPS soundwhore, or really into the "muh immersion" aspect of gaming, it's probably not gonna be worth it for you. It's like getting a 144Hz monitor, a Cherry MX mechanical plank, and high-end gaming mouse but not being a hardcore gamer.

That's because, like I said, you're not getting real VSS like that. Even if you select surround sound in the game, if the playback device is 2-channel, it still gets downmixed to stereo (otherwise you'd be missing sounds), and that stereo signal is what Windows Sonic is trying to virtualize, which is working about as poorly as you'd expect. In order for a DSP like Sonic or the GSX 1000 to do its thang, it needs to receive a full, unadulterated surround signal.

 

(That's because that was my experience thanks)

 

Yup, your experience validated was I was explaining in posts #33 and #35. It's not as if I haven't tested these things myself, you know.

 

What do you want man, a cookie!

 

No thanks, had too many of those over the holidays.

 

Ha, ok

 

i'll just buy a new mouse. i'm still using the razer starcraft 2 branded spectre and it isn't supported anymore so

 

You just love Razer peripherals, don't you?

 

was gonna get a corsair glave

 

Pretty pricey. A Nixeus Revel is only $30.