Surround Sound for Headphones?

Quote:
For headphone your better off doing research here www.headfi.com


I have the Sennheiser HD600 and love them. I also have the AKG 701's but they are a lot more money. I highly recommend the HD 600's. You'll be amazed by them.

Sry I don't know anything about the receiver. I have a Denon with Dolby Headphone, and it's a nice feature.


I just looked that receiver up. I don't know what your paying for it, but it shows a price of $599. You need to do some research on the forum I gave you. I think you'd be better purchasing a headphone amp, and connecting it to your DVD player. An amp with crossfeed maybe.


For headphones check www.headphone.com

I just had one of these come in and had a chance to try them out. My key criteria in using this is for gaming on an Xbox.


Taking it out of the box, it was readily apparent that this was well-built and gave me confidence that if I drop it, it won't break on me. It's about the size of my blackberry, perhaps a little more square and seems to weigh roughly the same with batteries installed.


The most difficult part for me was in finding the optical-mini cable required for the digital input on this unit. I thought this would be easy to find, but for some reason just about all of the places convenient (Compusa, Best Buy, Circuit City, etc) to me did not carry such a cable. I ended up finding one at the Apple store (used to connect the Airport Express to a receiver).


Set up was easy...popped the included AA batteries into the unit, plugged in the cable from the Xbox's optical output, plugged in headphones (Sony MDR-V7506) and off I went.


I did do an A/B test with the sound out of this unit vs the headphone output from my TV (which uses the analog L/R output from the Xbox). What a difference the Dolby Headphone makes!


- Without this unit: I play Halo 2 quite a bit and recently started using headphones in order to try to better localize where the action was coming from etc. The basic analog output coming from the Xbox was ok at distinguishing between right and left, but that's about it. I think the best way to describe it is that everything was in the plane between my ears...not in 'front' of me at all. A grenade exploding 15 feet in forward of me at a 45 degree angle to the right (1 - 2 o'clock), sounded the same as one exploding directly to my right (3 o'clock). Any advantage I had in terms of being able to distinguish where noises came was lost by the lack of this front/back dimension. I noticed that playing this was tiring and somewhat frustrating as I was listening for something that wasn't there.


- With this unit: I fired up Halo 2 on the Xbox and just ran around on the Ivory Tower map to see how it sounded. I went to the base of the elevator and turned the master chief around, and I was blown away by how the headphones rendered surround sound. The elevator was behind me, making the same whooshing, mechanical noise. Physically I know there are no additional speakers than the two on my headphones, but holy cow this was nice. I toss a grenade, and turn as the grenade explodes...sure enough the sound of that explosion is to a T exactly where I think it should be based on the direction I'm facing. Very cool.


I played H2 for several hours using this unit. After about 2-3 hours, the batteries that came with the unit died. The product sheet says that alkaline batteries should last 10 hours, manganese 2-3 hours. I'm guessing the ones that came with the unit were manganese. Unfortunately it happened mid-game, without warning. The way this manifested itself is that the sound went away completely (no dimming, no beeps of warning) - then it went into a weird cycle of powering off and on. For say 10 seconds at a time I had sound, at full volume, and then it would die for 10-15 seconds, repeating this for 5-10 minutes while I finished the game I was in. The next day I bought a set of rechargeable AA (2500 mAh) batteries and a charger to plug into the wall next to the Xbox. I used the setup again last night with freshly charged batteries, played for 4-5 hours with no problems.


So far I am very pleased with this unit - I've already caught a couple of people sneaking up on me in H2 that I know would have taken me down with a melee to the back of the head without me hearing a thing before.