Congrats Tkin for your new 7.1 virtual sound card. I guess my suggestion actually helped you.
Megamind, nice purchase mate...Enjoy gaming more now.
S_V, what to say...I guess you've given max number of Congratulation in this thread for awesome purchases. Add one from me...Superb purchase buddy.
Regarding the Steel Series Siberia USB Sound card or 90% of the USB Virtual Surround Sound cards, the audio controller chipset is provided by C-Media, a company which produces virtual surround capable chipsets for Headsets and Sound cards.
You will find some cheaper sound cards as less as RS 250 to 300 in ebay.in. These cards use C-Media USB Sound controller with USB 1.1 interface and very good to convert your standard headphones into a 7.1 capable one. But remember, your headphone needs to be good enough to reproduce all the frequencies and dB level to produce the virtual surround effects. anything over 48 bit 48 KHz audio is not entirely possible due to the limited bandwidth of USB 1.1 interface. But they do provide good normalization and dynamic range compression. For testing you guys can try one, price is only 250 bucks.
On the other hands headphones fro Roccat or the Siberia sound cards use C-media USB 2.0 interface based advanced sound chip and can provide full 48 bit 92 KHz audio. As a result the pseudo surround effect is more prominent and has more depth.
Frontech has also launched a model, JIL-1920, USB 7.1 channel virtual surround headphone. In BBSR, they shopkeepers were not able to configured it and luckily I was there. So I have received a sample from them to test and configuration. The price is only 1.7K (I didn't pay it). It uses the 1.1 USB version of the chipset.
After testing for couple of days here is my basic feedback:-
1. It really creates virtual surround effect.
2. The Controller driver provides very nice interface for setting up the Virtual Speakers.
3. It also does provide lots of surround effects and pre configured sound settings.
4. The 5.1 surround setting is really good but 7.1 is not that prominent due to the lack of bandwidth from USB 1.1 interface.
5. The Soundcard in the headphone does provide good amplification and Normalization without distorting the sound. The highs are really good.
6. Mids are above acceptable but lows are not that good, if you use full volume they are little hard to listen.
7. I tested it with BF3 and gaming performance is good, better than 5.1 movies
8. CPU usage is slightly low as the external soundcard is getting used rather than the internal REalteck one.
In fact I'm also planning to buy one to convert my HS1A to a virtual surround Headphone.
Well, enough of my lecture, lets discussed what I have purchased, I think you guys don't know that my PSU went Kaput couple of days back n with the Service Center now. So was planning to get one Notebook. After a lot of research and after the last Sunday's Bike accident, after hitting the head in the road and getting some nasty cuts in my leg and foot n some resulting stitches , I decided it is Monday or Never.
So purchased my New LAPPY yesterday:
The Model is Asus A43SJ -VX502D. It is a 14.1" laptop. The configs are
Intel 2nd Gen Dual Core B940 (2 GHz, 2 MB L3 Cache)
4 GB DDR3 1333 MHz DDR3 Ram (4GB X 1) [Upgraded from 2 GB while purchasing]
500 GB 5400 RPM SATA HDD
Nvidia GT 520M 1 GB DDR3 Graphics
2 USB 2.0 port
one USB 3.0 port
BlueTooth V 3.0
Wifi 102.11 b/g/n
8X Dual Layer DVD R/W
14.1" Display with 1366X768 resolution and very good Viewing angle.
HDMI and HDCP output.
Asus backpack and Intex RED optical Mouse
All the things came @ 25K all. Nice and great VFM, isn't it.
And all the t
.BTW. can you tell me how it perform with normal headphone like frontech or zebronics??I mean to say did you get virtual 7.1 effect with any headphone out there in market??
