byler47

Reputable
Jan 12, 2018
50
0
4,540
ATTENTION ALL AUDIOPHILES! I NEED YOUR ASSISTANCE!

Okay, now that I have your focus, here is my conglomeration of my proclamation of questions/statements. Also this is gonna be kinda long...

I have a Razer Kraken 7.1 v2 Chroma headset, and it has served me well. It's comfortable, it sounds good (in my opinion) for gaming and decent for music, especially with a system audio equalizer. But, I've been seeing some controversy over headsets vs headphones for gaming. I've watched my fair share of videos and read a lot of stuff about it too, but never came to a reasonable conclusion. Let's start with the elephant in the room.

Headphones vs Headset
.

People generally say that headsets are better for gaming, because that's what they're manufacturered for. Unfortunately, sound quality is often somewhat overlooked in a lot of headsets in exchange for other features, like noise cancelling, RGB, etc. These features are a great addition to the headset, but if sound quality has to suffer for it, than it doesn't make much sense. With headphones, audio is typically the main focus, which is crucial to me. I already have a mic (Blue Yeti), so a mic doesn't really matter much. I've looked at a few other headsets and one that perked my interest was the Steelseries Arctis 7/Pro/Pro Wireless. The wireless factor hasn't been of much priority but has a lot going for it. For one, you don't get that annoying sound of your cable rubbing on your shirt, and secondly, you don't have to worry about the cable at all.

Noise Cancelling

For me, personally, this is almost a must have. My PC is right up on my desk, and there's often the sound of other people talking inside and outside my room. I say "my room," but truth is it's practically abmulti-purpose den for everyone to come in and do stuff. So, yeah, noise reduction is pretty important to me.

7.1 Surround Sound

With gaming as the main focus here, this seems rather important to me because I play a little of FPS games like Overwatch, CSGO, some R6S, and some others.A lot of people tend to disagree because if it isn't true 7.1, it doesn't do it justice, and even then, true 7.1 is expensive and often lacks the rich sound you get from a 7.1 speaker setup. The virtual 7.1 in my Razer Kraken seems to be fairly decent, so I'm not sure what they're talking about.

Bottom Line/Concluding Stuff

I'm looking at getting a new headset/set of headphones, preferably under around 165$. But if they're really worth it, I'd consider spending another 50$ or so. Anyway, what are your suggestions? What do you think?
 

Lutfij

Titan
Moderator
If I were to spend the money you've given in your thread's post, I'd look at a HyperX Cloud (I) headset if I was able to find one now for 100USD. I'd also look into either a Razer Tiamat headset since it's the only headset on the market or in any brands portfolio that is true surround, being able to connect to all ports of 8 channels of a sound cards output. You could look into the high end Sennheiser headsets from GameOne or Beyerdynamics.

If you're an audiophile, you would be gearing your purchases to get better audio quality from your content and a little less from your games. It'd also mean you're dealing with a discrete sound card or DAC's/amps and not relying on the onboard sound card.

Where are you located and what is your preferred site for purchase?
 

byler47

Reputable
Jan 12, 2018
50
0
4,540
I'm in the US. Usually I buy from Amazon, eBay, or Newegg. The Tiamat sounds (no pun intended) like a good investment, but I just want to make absolutely sure that I'm getting a good product that will serve me well for a good long while. I don't have an aftermarket sound card but I have been looking into getting one.
 
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Agree headphones will sound MUCH better even budget studio cans will be a major improvement over any headset under $100.

Check out the Sennheiser HD 598 Cs, they have excellent isolation to block out outside sounds.

Since you already have a razer headset, it should be using the Razer Surround app which should also work with other headphones. There are also plenty of other virtual surround options:

- some games have a virtual surround driver built-in to the game itself, if you have a "headphone" option in your audio output this may be it.

- Windows 10 has a spatial sound option called "sonic", if you right-click on your speaker icon, under "spatial sound" you should be able to enable it. It is also a virtual surround driver that sound pretty good.

- some Realtek on-board sound chips have it available, and you can enable in your sound manager application when you have 2-channel speakers active there is a check-box that allows to you enable virtual surround.

Personally I am using a Samson SR-850 with a Zalman ZM-Mic1 as my headset, sounds better than my son's HyperX Revolvers IMO. Using a Sound Blaster Play!3 which uses SBX surround (very adjustable to your liking, my preferred vsurround so far).
 
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TacticalBeard

Honorable
Aug 17, 2016
11
0
10,520
ATTENTION ALL AUDIOPHILES! I NEED YOUR ASSISTANCE!

Okay, now that I have your focus, here is my conglomeration of my proclamation of questions/statements. Also this is gonna be kinda long...

I have a Razer Kraken 7.1 v2 Chroma headset, and it has served me well. It's comfortable, it sounds good (in my opinion) for gaming and decent for music, especially with a system audio equalizer. But, I've been seeing some controversy over headsets vs headphones for gaming. I've watched my fair share of videos and read a lot of stuff about it too, but never came to a reasonable conclusion. Let's start with the elephant in the room.

Headphones vs Headset.

People generally say that headsets are better for gaming, because that's what they're manufacturered for. Unfortunately, sound quality is often somewhat overlooked in a lot of headsets in exchange for other features, like noise cancelling, RGB, etc. These features are a great addition to the headset, but if sound quality has to suffer for it, than it doesn't make much sense. With headphones, audio is typically the main focus, which is crucial to me. I already have a mic (Blue Yeti), so a mic doesn't really matter much. I've looked at a few other headsets and one that perked my interest was the Steelseries Arctis 7/Pro/Pro Wireless. The wireless factor hasn't been of much priority but has a lot going for it. For one, you don't get that annoying sound of your cable rubbing on your shirt, and secondly, you don't have to worry about the cable at all.

Noise Cancelling

For me, personally, this is almost a must have. My PC is right up on my desk, and there's often the sound of other people talking inside and outside my room. I say "my room," but truth is it's practically abmulti-purpose den for everyone to come in and do stuff. So, yeah, noise reduction is pretty important to me.

7.1 Surround Sound

With gaming as the main focus here, this seems rather important to me because I play a little of FPS games like Overwatch, CSGO, some R6S, and some others.A lot of people tend to disagree because if it isn't true 7.1, it doesn't do it justice, and even then, true 7.1 is expensive and often lacks the rich sound you get from a 7.1 speaker setup. The virtual 7.1 in my Razer Kraken seems to be fairly decent, so I'm not sure what they're talking about.

Bottom Line/Concluding Stuff

I'm looking at getting a new headset/set of headphones, preferably under around 165$. But if they're really worth it, I'd consider spending another 50$ or so. Anyway, what are your suggestions? What do you think?
The arctus promwith game DAC from steel series is very very nice to my ears as some one who is pick about audio but wanted something to game with