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Dolby Headphone Q

R

Ronco

[H]ard|Gawd
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Oct 6, 2005
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I don't need a headset at home anymore as I've finally got around to treating my home office a little for undesirable acoustics, and also installing a broadcast-grade mic.

So I'm looking to re-do what I used to do with the Elite Pro and the Fireface 800 in order to have a headphone / monitor pull both gaming and 'serious listening' duty, which is to stack them together - i.e. connect the analog out of the Elite Pro into an input of the Fireface, so that I could just do all the output switching/muting on the RME.

Only this time with [insert gaming soundcard here] and a Prism Orpheus.

With the Elite Pro, CMSS used to kick in even if there was no headphone plugged in - only a line output. Just checking that soundcards with Dolby Headphone can do this as well, i.e. route Dolby Headphone to the line outputs..?
 
I think it depends on the sound card, and how you have it set in the drivers (they may only allow Dolby Headphone to be turned on if Headphone is selected as the output device). I believe the Xonar cards are like that (the DG is, and I'm pretty sure the DX was the same).
 
On my Xonar STX, I have the option for Dolby Virtual Speaker instead of Dolby Headphone when switching outputs from Headphones to Line Out (I am using the unified drivers, not the ones straight from Asus, though).

Going by the quick description on Dolby's site, they look like they accomplish the same thing.
 
Hmmm.

@havermeyer It's likely to be similar, but not the same thing.

Anyone have suggestions for a DH-capable card that will do this? (USB or PCI-E)

The reason I want to do it like the above is simply that I don't want a separate 'gaming headphone' and 'listening headphone'. I could of course do the switching to a single headphone further up the audio chain with a headphone switch, but then I'd need to adjust levels independently from separate interfaces and all that jazz - also don't want another box cluttering up my desk. If I fed the output of the gaming soundcard into the pro soundcard I can do everything from there.

I suppose I could see what happens if I connected the headphone output to the line inputs of the Orpheus, but I'd rather avoid something either interface wasn't designed specifically to handle.
 
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So I'll coda this thread with a couple of comments:

The Dolby Headphone implementation on the STX is worthless when compared with e.g. the Logitech G35. It really does border on irrelevantly non-functional. And yes, it can only be output via the headphone socket.

And maybe it's unrealistic, but I'm also surprised CMSS hasn't really moved on (once again, in comparison to the positioning accuracy / environment immersion of the G35 - which I didin't think was all that accurate until I heard these supposedly flagship soundcard renditions) on the competing Creative card since back when I was gaming with the Elite Pro ~6 years ago.

Color me disappointed (and ~$150 out, since I sold both cards for ~50% as I had no use for them - especially as the real-world audio performance of the STX is quite poor as well in a fairly packed gaming rig). I'll stick with the G35 for gaming.
 
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I've used DH on my Sondigo Inferno once in a while for gaming and movies, and it seems to work quite well with open cans and not so well with closed cans. There are 3 settings in the C-Media control panel for it, I find the lowest one to be the best, the other two seem to overdo it imho. All in, it can be quite convincing, surprising how well it fakes you into hearing things far behind and in front. I guess it's a matter of taste, and I'm not one for audio processing usually but DH is some pretty neat tech.
 
dustNbone said:
I've used DH on my Sondigo Inferno once in a while for gaming and movies, and it seems to work quite well with open cans and not so well with closed cans. There are 3 settings in the C-Media control panel for it, I find the lowest one to be the best, the other two seem to overdo it imho. All in, it can be quite convincing, surprising how well it fakes you into hearing things far behind and in front. I guess it's a matter of taste, and I'm not one for audio processing usually but DH is some pretty neat tech.
Click to expand...

There are degrees of DH effectiveness depending on the implementation. The Asus STX (as does CMSS on the Fatality Champion of course) does provide a feeling of space - and yes, I ran it with a very wide range of open and closed phones - but with nowhere near the level of positioning effectiveness the G35 does.
 
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