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Razer Barracuda HP-1

octopus41092

Golden Member
Currently I have the Razer Barracuda AC-1 Sound Card. I'm using the Steelseries 5Hv2 headset. I was wondering would it be worth it to go and buy the Razer HP-1 for $65. Some of the things I want to know are which has better:

Sound Quality in Games
Sound Quality in Music (Looking for mostly bass and clarity)
Sound Quality in Movies
Positional Audio
Comfort
Sound Canceling
Microphone
 
I'm going to say no, but I'm biased against the surround headphones. A game with good audio positioning and decent 2 channel headphones should be the optimal solution. It sounds odd, but stereo headphones are actually excellent at positional audio (check out some binaural recordings to experience it firsthand). Part of the reason that surround headphones aren't that good is that they try to cram 4 different drivers in the same space that a normal headphone puts one, and so they end up using lower quality ones.

Hmm I checked Amazon for the usual suspects, but it looks like the prices for them are about average (right about $100), which they can generally be had for less than that. The ones I'd recommend would be the Sennheiser HD-280, Audio-Technica ATH-A500/700/900, Equation Audio RP-21, and there's a couple of others. Its not uncommon to find them for $80 or so, and they would be much better headphones than just about any surround ones.

One other thing to note is going the stereo headphone route you should check out having your sound card encode the audio into Dolby Digital or DTS, and then apply Dolby Headphone (I'm fairly sure that the Razer card can do all of that). You might not even need to encode to DD/DTS first, since plenty of games now have their own audio processing system. Of course I didn't touch on the subject of the microphone, but there's a clip-on one that I think Newegg sells that works pretty well. Quite a few people report actually having better overall results this way.

That's what I would recommend anyways. If you're happy with what you have now, then I would say the Razer headphones are not going to really improve upon it significantly (compared to what you could apply your money towards), so don't spend the money.
 
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