Hi. so I have finally got my new pc and life is fine and dandy.
The next thing I intend to upgrade next is the sound. But this is something I know little about and would like help on what to do for the best low price sound soloution.
I have a mic so i thought i'd get a nice set of headphones and saw the sennheiser hd 201's which look really nice for the money. only £18 from amazon. I also use razer surround which i think is a brilliant virtual surround emulator ( i use it with a pair of in ear headphones and the difference in game is amazing). On top of this i had a look at a new sound card and saw the relatively cheap creative go! pro
What I am asking is will the sennheiser headphones work with the usb sound card and razer surround and secondly is it worth getting the creative go?
If you are on a desktop with a nice enough mobo, and thus audio chip, this sound card won't make much difference. On a regular laptop it should however. I've already tested some of sennheisers cheaper end cans and was disappointed by the HD201's. They sound quite flat and the bass is lacking and muddy. I do love the 202's on the other hand(both the first and second version). They might look cheap but I love them.
I personally dislike software to equalize/modify audio, but I'm guessing it'll work.
1. Don't spend money on a soundcard, it doesn't make any difference unless you use speakers or headphones that can actually let you hear the difference. The Sennheiser HD201 are not headphones that can make you hear the difference. The minimum level headphones that will make you hear the difference are the Sennheiser HD250 Studio headphones or the AKG K540 or something similar from Beyerdynamic, depending on your use.
2. Don't buy soundcards from computer hardware manufacturers, you'll pay a lot more for a lot less. Buy an audio interface in a musical instruments store. For 40 EUR you can have more than any Creative or Asus soundcard can ever offer, including swappable opamps, much bigger and better caps, internally sandwiched and equal lengths audio traces, a much better D/A-A/D converter, and an OSS/ALSA supported DSP chip that actually works. The Creative X-Fi Go pro costs the same and isn't a real X-Fi device, as it doesn't have the E-MU DSP inside that does the X-Fi signal processing (which is great as such). I've posted a link to such a studio grade device on this forum in a similar thread last week.