Audio Performance & Testing

Testing is going to be real world in that we will have used the headphones over the course of the last two weeks and have performed installation procedures and have reconfigured our audio and speaker configurations for best results and this is what we came up with. Here is there system we will be testing from this time around.

• ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe Mainboard
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Processor
• OCZ DDR PC-4000 2x 1024MB Platinum Memory
• EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GTX KO Edition (SLI)
• 4x 300GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10 SATA HDD
• Samsung 24" LCD Display
• Realtek Audio with AC97 CODEC
• SilverStone 800Watt Power Supply

This system is almost a year a old now and is no longer our production computer and has migrated to our latest test rig, but I am sure we have still have loads of fun with testing games with these headphones on this system. Addin the cable splitter to the headphones we will now install the headphones and get initial reaction.

First off make sure you're system audio is configured for multi channel output. For our case, we configured for 8 Channels through our Realtek audio manager that came with our ASUS motherboard software. In order to utilize the headphones to there full potential and experience full surround capabilties you will need to open up your advance audio properties and set the speaker configuration to at least a 6 channel speaker system. With our system we chose 8CH Speaker because this gave us the best 3D capabilties or at least in my opinion on this particular system.

Now I was eager to test the 3D audio positioning and much to my surprise the channel seperation is awesome! Each channel clearly reproduces a full 360 environment using this configuration. Using 6 channels we couldn't tell much of a difference other than it sounded as if the sound was a littler thinner, so this is why we liked the 8 channel settings for this system and I STRESS this system. Reason I say this, each audio sound card or on-board sound system will give different results respective to the type of hardware you are using.

Now that we have got our system running these headphones under this configuration we decided to test some music, and boy let me tell ya, while these things are not designed to blow your mind in ultra mega output, these things sound really REALLY good. However we found out that using other speaker configurations while give better performance listening to MP3's. Example, we set the speaker configuration to desktop stereo speakers and that reproduced the sound without the 3 dimensional signal processing adding echo and delay to your music. Having been said this is just a personal preference, I like the sound better for each situation, for playing games I use seven dot one.

If I am listening to MP3's or playing games, I will navigate to the Advanced Audio Properties and also set the speaker configuration, so I will use Desktop Stereo Speakers setting for listening to music. For games I will use the 7.1 home theater speaker setting, I like the plain stereo image for the windows environment and music while using 7.1 for games, but thats just me. Anyway, at the Advanced Audio Properties you should select the settings in this speaker setup combo box and select the speaker setup that sounds best for your system. Time to check out some game titles and see how these headphones help my frag rates.