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Sunday, October 14 2007

Headphones?

By Greg on Sunday, October 14 2007, 13:04 - hardware

I'm looking for good headphones. If I follow my good design mood I'll probably buy the Skull Candy Hesh Black at 49 euros (yes, $49 USD is 49 euros when imported by a reseller...). I'm not an audio expert and I mainly know brands like sony, akg, korg, sennheiser and beyerdynamic. I have never heard about Skull Candy. Here are some technical details and a picture:

Max. Power Handling: 100 mW
Driver Unit Size: 50 mm
Frequency Response: 100 Hz - 18 kHz
Impedance: 32 ohm

hesh_black.jpg

If I follow my best quality mood I may choose the Beyerdynamic DT-440 Edition 2007 at 111 euros. Quality has a price :(.

[edit] I've finally bought the Skull Candy Hesh Black. Hope they are as good looking as they are in pictures and the quality confirms what I read in most of the reviews.

To understand how headphones work an how to evaluate them, I found these resources:

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Friday, October 12 2007

Turtle Beach Audio Advantage SRM USB sound card

By Greg on Friday, October 12 2007, 12:39 - hardware

If you knew the early ages of the PC, Turtle Beach must remember you something! It seems they are yet manufacturing high quality sound cards. Please apologize if I ever thought Turtle Beach was dead :p.

Why am I writing about this brand? I was not sure audio ports of my MacBook were S/PDIF ones. Now I know this is the case and I can directly connect the audio S/PDIF output of the MacBook to a amplifier. The doubt led me to seek a good USB sound card. Why USB? Because a MacBook has no PCMCIA (PC Card II nor ExpressCard) port. After a quick search I found the Turtle Beach Audio Advantage SRM and Amigo. There is a small comparative of the 3 USB sound card models produced by Turtle Beach. here is a review from overclockersclub.com.

Ok I can plug a S/PDIF cable between my MacBook and an amplifier. The problem is... I don't have an amplifier and don't plan to buy one soon. However, I want to listen to music with a decent quality on my laptop, and also to hear good audio when I watch a movie. That why I'm considering to buy a Turtle Beach AA SRM.Any feedback and experience are welcome! I hope it works fine with GNU/Linux and Mac OS X, Alsa natively supports it through snd-usb-audio module. I'd like to check that all features are supported because TT provides a proprietary win32 Control Panel and no linux tools :(.

Next step: find good headphones.

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