@rejzor - are you aware that since Microsoft rewrote the audio stack in Windows Vista and subsequent versions, EAX has been basically dead?
Or was it? Creative has ALchemy, which unlike ASUS GX2 crap actually works and can be also used for games that don't even use EAX extension. Besides, EAX itself is just a small extension in 3D audio...
Ok got the soundblaster, took a while to hook it up due to confusion with the pci slot - it had a little rubber nub as a third spot and I didn't pay attention and thought that had to go into the pci express. Lol.
Anyway - installed it, it reverted all my overclocks (guess that's a mobo safety feature?) reverted them back, loaded up windows - installed the drivers rebooted and.
Bam! much much better sound, really feel the power now. And it's not 'just louder' the sound is tenfold superior to the onboard, I now have bass and it's crazy bass.. not like LOUD bass.. like real bass I've never heard.
I left the SBX stuff on default, I'm not sure if I want the 'surround' setting on or not, I feel like leaving it on surround is fake 5.1/7.1?? which would harm me in-game? Not sure haven't tried it out. As for the EQ I have that off and haven't messed with it yet.
For the microphone, I lowered the DB to +20 and made the volume of the mic 85% and took off the 'echo' reduction as that would cut out my voice a lot, I left noise reduction in but may remove that also, it does remove the sound of my A/C but it makes my voice less clear in my opinion (I guess the sennheiser microphone already came with noise reduction built in so it may be the cause of this.
Anyway, mic sounds really good, audio is tenfold better. Now all that's left is to play with the EQ and see if I want surround on or not.
edit: So I couldn't established a connection to anything - I was confused, steam and etc worked but all websites didn't load and windows couldn't find its update server? I thought I changed something wrong in bios or the soundcard was doing something funny. Turns out when my overclocks and etc reset, what it really was - was my bios resetting to defaults because it detected new hardware. So it went back to the date of the bios, july 2012 -- so windows was screwed up cause it was the wrong date. that actually made websites say they couldn't connect securely and windows not find its update server.
I changed everything back in bios initially when I saw the reset, but didn't expect anything to change on windows itself. So all settings should be restored. (By the way is that safety feature disableable? had no idea a bios would reset itself when new hardware came in -- some settings remained like integrated graphics being disabled or intel rapid link w/e I turned off, but all overclocks and stuff changed)
There is no such thing as fake 5.1 or 7.1. The Surround slider controls HRTF properties. It's a psychoacoustic technology.
As for the mic controls, turn off FX (it's fine as such, but causes funky sound problems when you are making noises or say stuff like go go go) and Acoustic Echo Cancelation, otherwise it will cut your voice like you've noticed. Move the Mic volume slider to max and decrease Mic boost by one step from max. Enable Smart volume and leave it at default, also enable Noise reduction. That kinda works the best for me and G230 headset.
Oh and disable Bass option entirely in SBX Pro for 2.1 speakers or headset. It makes bass all rubbish.
Just try my EQ preset for fun and then tweak from there on. It's causing me to hear metallic bite sounds when i'm grinding RT's now, before this EQ preset, all i could hear was the bite growl from a skulk. Something i've never heard before in NS2 game.
FX I had off, acoustic I turned off cause when I said the same thing over and over, it'd cut out. Noise cancel I left on, smart volume I didn't touch and personally don't want my voice to be auto adjusted.
So on the SBX I shouldn't adjust the 'bass' option, I should just turn it off? and I'll try out your EQ settings for sure and let you know what I think! (Also with my current settings I'm hearing instruments and sounds in songs I never heard before. Weird! lol)
Can you do me a favor and post the DB level you have set in the equalizer for each plus the SBX ones, just scroll your mouse over them and it'll have a number on top of the slider so I can copy the settings and adjust/play with them. I've tested the pre-made profiles and the only one I found useful was 'first person shooter' however that setting just made certain sounds stand out and drained out the rest which felt kind of empty
Bam! much much better sound, really feel the power now. And it's not 'just louder' the sound is tenfold superior to the onboard, I now have bass and it's crazy bass.. not like LOUD bass.. like real bass I've never heard.
I left the SBX stuff on default, I'm not sure if I want the 'surround' setting on or not, I feel like leaving it on surround is fake 5.1/7.1?? which would harm me in-game? Not sure haven't tried it out. As for the EQ I have that off and haven't messed with it yet.
There is a bass boost and an expander in the SBX effects suite. You would have to disable all the SBX filters before being able to make a real comparison.
Bam! much much better sound, really feel the power now. And it's not 'just louder' the sound is tenfold superior to the onboard, I now have bass and it's crazy bass.. not like LOUD bass.. like real bass I've never heard.
I left the SBX stuff on default, I'm not sure if I want the 'surround' setting on or not, I feel like leaving it on surround is fake 5.1/7.1?? which would harm me in-game? Not sure haven't tried it out. As for the EQ I have that off and haven't messed with it yet.
There is a bass boost and an expander in the SBX effects suite. You would have to disable all the SBX filters before being able to make a real comparison.
+3 +6 -6 -3 +2 +4 +6 0 +6 +4 (level at 0db)
To decrease bass slightly, lower first 4 to +2 +4 -4 -2 or even less...
By the way I've made some changes - I've completely disabled all SBX effects, personally I found they did nothing but negative for me - it just felt like filters were over audio sounds and in-game it caused some.. 'weirdness'
I will do all changes through the equalizer itself. I also set via windows to all the speakers/microphones to 'do not allow applications to take strict control of this device' to force everything to use the soundcard/mic settings and not alter them. Some people also said to set it to 24bit/96khz but I have not tried that, a lot of people say to set windows to 5.1 as well.. I don't think I'll fool with those yet. Really enjoying the improved sound though
Most games have a headphone setting which handles the positional audio using stereo. Any game that doesn't have that should be complained about as if it had mouse acceleration locked on.
They mention this in one of those videos, thanks @sharnrock for linking the other vid.
Most games have a headphone setting which handles the positional audio using stereo. Any game that doesn't have that should be complained about as if it had mouse acceleration locked on.
They mention this in one of those videos, thanks @sharnrock for linking the other vid.
I don't use the SBX setting as of right now, but with it set properly on - it tells you the 'distance/direction' of where someone is, regular positional audio just gives you the general area - if someone made a noise I literally could tell where it was coming from, I'm not sure if the crystalizer was set too high, or the surround was still high at like 24% but something was off because certain sounds felt 'muffled' and that was really frustrating.
I don't know what it is, maybe I should have gotten the open ear edition of these headphones? Or maybe I'm just not use to this 'better' sound quality? It's very different and requires a crap load of tweaking.. and settings that work for one game, don't work for another - I'll keep at it. Kind of thinking I should have went with open ear and just gotten an amp with an equalizer or something lol
windows 14% - setup to 5.1
flat EQ
all SBX off besides crystalizer - set at 25%
in-game set to headphones
This gives me 'regular' in-game audio to where I can hear everything, maybe I'll fool around with surround/EQ later on.. but for now this sounds like my old headsets w/ less bass and better quality. No missing/muffled sounds or weird sounding voice chat like surround did
Actually the sound behind you will always be "muffled", it's what makes it distinct to let you know it's coming from behind. The reason why our ears are shifted slightly forward.
Sorry, I didn't read all of this, and it's a bit of a necro. I need a decent headset but it doesn't need to be wireless (low budget). I've only had one speaker working for months lol.. I wanna hear skulks through walls again
Just out of principle, don't buy anything from Creative. Sound processing is at least as hard as global illumination, and deserves at least as much processing oomph as graphics. But Creative have kept the industry stuck in 1998. Sure, more bits, more channels, better signal to noise; same hopelessly obsolete tech.
The excellent HRTFs and wave tracing of Aureal is still difficult to match, 15 years later. Only in software has progress been made on audio tech, and then mostly undone by Microsoft by killing OpenAL.
What Creative did to Aureal and to the industry is unforgiveable. They litigated Aureal into the ground; Aureal won, but went bankrupt from legal costs; then Creative bought the tech, which is still impressive today (poor sample quality of late 90's games aside), and just burried it.
Look at this, this is better positional audio than 99% of games today (and that defintely includes NS2):
Comments
Or was it? Creative has ALchemy, which unlike ASUS GX2 crap actually works and can be also used for games that don't even use EAX extension. Besides, EAX itself is just a small extension in 3D audio...
Anyway - installed it, it reverted all my overclocks (guess that's a mobo safety feature?) reverted them back, loaded up windows - installed the drivers rebooted and.
Bam! much much better sound, really feel the power now. And it's not 'just louder' the sound is tenfold superior to the onboard, I now have bass and it's crazy bass.. not like LOUD bass.. like real bass I've never heard.
I left the SBX stuff on default, I'm not sure if I want the 'surround' setting on or not, I feel like leaving it on surround is fake 5.1/7.1?? which would harm me in-game? Not sure haven't tried it out. As for the EQ I have that off and haven't messed with it yet.
For the microphone, I lowered the DB to +20 and made the volume of the mic 85% and took off the 'echo' reduction as that would cut out my voice a lot, I left noise reduction in but may remove that also, it does remove the sound of my A/C but it makes my voice less clear in my opinion (I guess the sennheiser microphone already came with noise reduction built in so it may be the cause of this.
Anyway, mic sounds really good, audio is tenfold better. Now all that's left is to play with the EQ and see if I want surround on or not.
edit: So I couldn't established a connection to anything - I was confused, steam and etc worked but all websites didn't load and windows couldn't find its update server? I thought I changed something wrong in bios or the soundcard was doing something funny. Turns out when my overclocks and etc reset, what it really was - was my bios resetting to defaults because it detected new hardware. So it went back to the date of the bios, july 2012 -- so windows was screwed up cause it was the wrong date. that actually made websites say they couldn't connect securely and windows not find its update server.
I changed everything back in bios initially when I saw the reset, but didn't expect anything to change on windows itself. So all settings should be restored. (By the way is that safety feature disableable? had no idea a bios would reset itself when new hardware came in -- some settings remained like integrated graphics being disabled or intel rapid link w/e I turned off, but all overclocks and stuff changed)
As for the mic controls, turn off FX (it's fine as such, but causes funky sound problems when you are making noises or say stuff like go go go) and Acoustic Echo Cancelation, otherwise it will cut your voice like you've noticed. Move the Mic volume slider to max and decrease Mic boost by one step from max. Enable Smart volume and leave it at default, also enable Noise reduction. That kinda works the best for me and G230 headset.
Oh and disable Bass option entirely in SBX Pro for 2.1 speakers or headset. It makes bass all rubbish.
Just try my EQ preset for fun and then tweak from there on. It's causing me to hear metallic bite sounds when i'm grinding RT's now, before this EQ preset, all i could hear was the bite growl from a skulk. Something i've never heard before in NS2 game.
So on the SBX I shouldn't adjust the 'bass' option, I should just turn it off? and I'll try out your EQ settings for sure and let you know what I think! (Also with my current settings I'm hearing instruments and sounds in songs I never heard before. Weird! lol)
@rejzor
There is a bass boost and an expander in the SBX effects suite. You would have to disable all the SBX filters before being able to make a real comparison.
+3 +6 -6 -3 +2 +4 +6 0 +6 +4 (level at 0db)
To decrease bass slightly, lower first 4 to +2 +4 -4 -2 or even less...
By the way I've made some changes - I've completely disabled all SBX effects, personally I found they did nothing but negative for me - it just felt like filters were over audio sounds and in-game it caused some.. 'weirdness'
I will do all changes through the equalizer itself. I also set via windows to all the speakers/microphones to 'do not allow applications to take strict control of this device' to force everything to use the soundcard/mic settings and not alter them. Some people also said to set it to 24bit/96khz but I have not tried that, a lot of people say to set windows to 5.1 as well.. I don't think I'll fool with those yet. Really enjoying the improved sound though
They mention this in one of those videos, thanks @sharnrock for linking the other vid.
I don't use the SBX setting as of right now, but with it set properly on - it tells you the 'distance/direction' of where someone is, regular positional audio just gives you the general area - if someone made a noise I literally could tell where it was coming from, I'm not sure if the crystalizer was set too high, or the surround was still high at like 24% but something was off because certain sounds felt 'muffled' and that was really frustrating.
I don't know what it is, maybe I should have gotten the open ear edition of these headphones? Or maybe I'm just not use to this 'better' sound quality? It's very different and requires a crap load of tweaking.. and settings that work for one game, don't work for another - I'll keep at it. Kind of thinking I should have went with open ear and just gotten an amp with an equalizer or something lol
windows 14% - setup to 5.1
flat EQ
all SBX off besides crystalizer - set at 25%
in-game set to headphones
This gives me 'regular' in-game audio to where I can hear everything, maybe I'll fool around with surround/EQ later on.. but for now this sounds like my old headsets w/ less bass and better quality. No missing/muffled sounds or weird sounding voice chat like surround did
Unless you just tried to explain that to me and it went over my head.. lol! Sounds good with crystalizer on 25%.. I'm happy!
The excellent HRTFs and wave tracing of Aureal is still difficult to match, 15 years later. Only in software has progress been made on audio tech, and then mostly undone by Microsoft by killing OpenAL.
What Creative did to Aureal and to the industry is unforgiveable. They litigated Aureal into the ground; Aureal won, but went bankrupt from legal costs; then Creative bought the tech, which is still impressive today (poor sample quality of late 90's games aside), and just burried it.
Look at this, this is better positional audio than 99% of games today (and that defintely includes NS2):