Hi,
I've never really cared much about PC audio, because I guess I had different priorities. But these days, as a professor and gamer, I find myself streaming a lot, and not for games. And, being stuck at home the whole day, I wouldn't be against updating my audio setup, for both gaming and listening. But I find that what I am looking for doesn't seem to exist on the market, and I'm confused on how to find it. Can someone point me in the right direction? This is what I want to do:
1) High quality headphone output for gaming and listening. I currently have some old Sennheiser HD545s, which sound great, but their open design makes them disturb other people. I'd like to find something of a similar quality, but closed, but I don't know where to look. Something around the level of the HD600s.
2) Decent discrete microphone. I am sick of the bad microphones on gaming headsets, and I'd like to step up to a microphone that will sound better. It doesn't have to record my "amazing" singing, but at least something that someone would podcast with. Rode Procaster, for example, or Rode NT-USB. Must be dynamic with cardiod pattern, to maximize off-axis noise rejection, especially from my keyboard.
3) Here's the hard part: I must have hardware monitoring. This is also known as sidetone, or microphone monitoring. This is a feature that exists on some headsets, and you can achieve it with certain mixers, but I am uncertain what the best way to do it is without either total overkill or total failure.
I have considered several gamer-centric products, and they aren't exactly what I'm looking for. These are:
a) Sennheiser GSX 1200 Pro. The feature list looks great, but if you look into people's discussions on it, it turns out that you cannot turn off it's microphone noise cancelling, which results in the microphone sampling running at 16khz. The mic sounds robotic and encoded. rejected. I hear the audio output and 7.1 virtualization is nice, though.
b) SBX G7. Again, the device sounds good, but it is performing a software filter on the microphone, resulting in sidetone lag. If I'm going to shell out real money for this gear, I want lag that cannot be heard.
Outside of gamer products, it seems like mostly the path is through "pro-audio" gear. It looks like a mixing board like the behringer xenyx can mix a microphone signal into audio being sent to headphones. But I don't know how the audio gets back to the computer. Does this mean I need to split the microphone signal back to the PC? I have zero experience in the area. Also, I'm concerned that I'll be spending big bucks for bad quality, because I have zero sense of what will do the job and what is overkill or underkill.
Another question. My motherboard has a SupremeFX S1220A audio chipset. I've read that this is a decent audio chipset, but can an external DAC outperform it?
I realize a number of my questions are probably clueless sounding, but any feedback you can give me would help. I'm not listening to vinyl, and I don't listen to that much lossless audio on the computer, so the source quality I am working with has a ceiling. Please tell me if I'm trying too hard to overbuild an audio system that will be underfed on low quality signal.
I've never really cared much about PC audio, because I guess I had different priorities. But these days, as a professor and gamer, I find myself streaming a lot, and not for games. And, being stuck at home the whole day, I wouldn't be against updating my audio setup, for both gaming and listening. But I find that what I am looking for doesn't seem to exist on the market, and I'm confused on how to find it. Can someone point me in the right direction? This is what I want to do:
1) High quality headphone output for gaming and listening. I currently have some old Sennheiser HD545s, which sound great, but their open design makes them disturb other people. I'd like to find something of a similar quality, but closed, but I don't know where to look. Something around the level of the HD600s.
2) Decent discrete microphone. I am sick of the bad microphones on gaming headsets, and I'd like to step up to a microphone that will sound better. It doesn't have to record my "amazing" singing, but at least something that someone would podcast with. Rode Procaster, for example, or Rode NT-USB. Must be dynamic with cardiod pattern, to maximize off-axis noise rejection, especially from my keyboard.
3) Here's the hard part: I must have hardware monitoring. This is also known as sidetone, or microphone monitoring. This is a feature that exists on some headsets, and you can achieve it with certain mixers, but I am uncertain what the best way to do it is without either total overkill or total failure.
I have considered several gamer-centric products, and they aren't exactly what I'm looking for. These are:
a) Sennheiser GSX 1200 Pro. The feature list looks great, but if you look into people's discussions on it, it turns out that you cannot turn off it's microphone noise cancelling, which results in the microphone sampling running at 16khz. The mic sounds robotic and encoded. rejected. I hear the audio output and 7.1 virtualization is nice, though.
b) SBX G7. Again, the device sounds good, but it is performing a software filter on the microphone, resulting in sidetone lag. If I'm going to shell out real money for this gear, I want lag that cannot be heard.
Outside of gamer products, it seems like mostly the path is through "pro-audio" gear. It looks like a mixing board like the behringer xenyx can mix a microphone signal into audio being sent to headphones. But I don't know how the audio gets back to the computer. Does this mean I need to split the microphone signal back to the PC? I have zero experience in the area. Also, I'm concerned that I'll be spending big bucks for bad quality, because I have zero sense of what will do the job and what is overkill or underkill.
Another question. My motherboard has a SupremeFX S1220A audio chipset. I've read that this is a decent audio chipset, but can an external DAC outperform it?
I realize a number of my questions are probably clueless sounding, but any feedback you can give me would help. I'm not listening to vinyl, and I don't listen to that much lossless audio on the computer, so the source quality I am working with has a ceiling. Please tell me if I'm trying too hard to overbuild an audio system that will be underfed on low quality signal.
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