Pc Headsets
 

Question most of the time i use headsets that have the 2 jacks well i odered some new headsets on line g330 and it's also usb, now is usb better or the jacks yes i know it's a stupid question well there be any diff:confused:

There are some differences...

1: I'm pretty sure that if you have some nice onboard sound card, you can't make use of it with a headset connected through USB.

2: USB headphones have to be relatively shy on the power usage.. Although they've come a long way, sound range and bass and such are still limited on USB devices. On regular gaming headsets you'll hardly hear the difference though.

3. Some people say USB devices use up some CPU. I don't get why to be honest, maybe because you'll have to install new drivers and those will add some background processes? Not noticeable on modern mid-price computers though.

So analog has a few advantages, you should use that if you can. But if you already went and bought USB, don't bother changing.

I've used analog and usb headsets, I currently own a G35. I gonna level with you, unless you consider yourself an audiophile you will not notice a difference. In fact the usb may be more convenient for you if you plan to use it with different comps.

USB is for *convenience* ... having a half dozen devices loading down the bus is going to be a problem no matter what bus you use (PCI, USB, etc).

If you have front panel sound jacks, I'd stick with those, myself. It depends on what headset we're discussing.

One downside of onboard audio and headphones (and pretty much any unshielded internal audio really) is that you may be able to hear electrical noise within your PC. For example, when I'm not playing anything over my headphones, I can hear little electrical noises and can actually tell when my hard drives are making reads and writes based on the sound signatures. Any decently loud audio overpowers this noise though. USB gets your sound components away from sources of electrical interference within your case, but I'm not sure if it's subject to other sources of interference.

Headsets are retarded.

Use your good/awesome/comfy headphones and a $6 Zalman USB mic. Don't blow money on a crappy "gaming" headset.

Actually, this *is* what I do.... studio headphones ftw.

I'm probably not looking to replace my current gear for a while yet, but does anyone know of anything that works decently well with front panel audio? IE cables short enough so that I don't run over them with my chair and some sort of volume control? Those have been issues for me with quite a few designs.

hmmm, can't help you. I'm using a fairly ancient set of old Sony studio music phones (old as in 20+ yrs). I have been looking at the 5:1 headsets... supposedly they're getting better, but I keep spending my money of anime/manga froufrou.

As far as cable length issues, I just use that velcro cable tie to loop them up but then I'm use that stuff on everything that looks like a wire :)

Biggest problem I've run across with front panel audio jacks is -- they're made of crap or something I see so many that are broken.

I'm one of those people where if I wear something out, there was probably a design flaw.:heh:

I think Tycho from Penny Arcade tried one of the 5.1 headsets at one point and found they tend to do a good job with telling you what direction a sound comes from, but they can't make it seem like a sound originates in the distance like a full 5.1 speaker setup can. I seem to remember him using it for Doom 3 though, so this would have been like six years back.

I remember a lot of debate on a few forums I was on about the merits of 5.1 versus using a signal processing algorithm like Dolby Headphone or whatever Creative uses on its cards with more audiophile oriented headphones... based on Dolby's preencoded demo vids though, I wasn't impressed. I could tell when something was coming from say, front left versus rear left, but anything that was supposed to pass in front of me sounded like it was going behind my head, at least with my headphones:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUrk2W_r5fc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fligG_SLnOc

(Also, slightly off topic, but speaking of old audio gear, I looked up the model number of the Sansui amplifier we got from my grandfather when he moved... it's the "A" revision of the company's first solid state amp, which was produced from 1969 to 1970. Still works great, although I wonder if it's ever needed any repair work.)

There are ordinary two channel stereo headphones that make the positional audio of 5.1 cans seem horrible in comparison.

Audio-Technica ATH AD-700, for starters.