LITTLEBLACKDOG.COM

Posted: Thu Apr 24, 2008 8:30 am Post subject: Gaming Headset

So lately as I've been running WoW raids more and more I find myself wearing my headset for longer and longer periods of time, and it's starting to bug me. I bought the cheapest headset I could find when I started playing. But now after wearing it for more than about an hour it starts to hurt my ears (earpieces rubbing/pressing on the ear).

Now there are times I'll have it on for up to 8 hours. Looking for suggestions on a gaming headset w/mic that is comfortable.... and must have an inline volume control. Sound quality is not uber important... I don't route my game sounds through the headset, only Ventrilo chat... long as voice sounds good, then it will work for me.

Posted: Thu Apr 24, 2008 9:33 am Post subject:

I have a Creative Fatal1ty headset, and a Koss headset.... nice over ear...and the mic on the Koss is a bit better. Only $30 ea.

Posted: Thu Apr 24, 2008 5:41 pm Post subject:

I highly recommend either the PC-151 or PC161/PC166 headsets from Sennheiser. I have the older PC-150 headset. They are quite comfortable, and the sound quality is good enough for music listening.

Posted: Mon Apr 28, 2008 2:10 pm Post subject:

After thinking for awhile..... I thought to myself "Who do I know that wears a headset for an extremely long period of time and would not cope with some uncomfortable POS... ?" to which I answered myself "Why the crazy bastards from the Warcraft guild Nihilum that raid for 12+ hours per day sometimes". So I went looking, seems they are all fans of SteelSound.

So I bought this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16826249016

And it is extremely comfortable.... I wore it for about 7 hours on Sunday and hardly even noticed I had it on. And I love the retractable microphone. However I do have an issue.

Does anyone know how or why the driver software would introduce artificial noise?

It has a USB soundcard.... I like these because I can still route my gamesounds/music through my external speakers, and only Ventrilo chat through the headset. My previous headset was an el-cheapo altec lansing model that also had the USB soundcard. Appears that both cards are made by, or at least contain components from C-Media. CM108 to be exact, http://www.cmedia.com.tw/?q=en/USB/CM108.

When I initially plugged the headset in, my computer saw it as being identical to the previous one. This was all well and good, except for one thing. The mic was open all the time, I could hear myself breathing/talking/typing in the headset. Even when no audio application was open.

So, I uninstalled the previous driver and installed the one that came on CD with the SteelSound headset. This took care of the open mic issue, however it introduced new problems. #1 being that there is a constant high pitched whine in the background whenever the mic is open. It comes across on Ventrilo... it even comes across if I just open up Sound Recorder, set my default recording device to the headset, and record a few seconds. #2 being that when people are talking on Vent, I get a crackling sound at times that can be rather annoying. This doesn't happen all the time, so I'm not 100% sure it's a byproduct of the new driver software.... but it's not there when using the previous C-media software, and it's not there if I set my default sound device to the headset and just listen to some music with the new driver installed. I even switched back to my previous headset while on vent, and the crackling went away.

So I went to the product page http://www.steelseries.com/us/products/audio/5hv2-usb/information
and there is a link directly off that page to download the latest driver. I uninstalled the old one, and installed this one and still the issues persist.

So as a final test I unplugged the headset from the USB soundcard and plugged straight into the soundcard on my comp. No crackling, no high pitched whine when I'm talking. Unfortunately, the USB soundcard was integrated into my previous headset, so I can't try plugging the new headset into that one.

But based on the fact that if I use the default windows driver, or the previous C-media driver the sounds are absent when connected USB.... and the fact that when the headset is plugged directly into the soundcard taking the USB out of the equation they are not there..... I'm led to believe it has to be a software thing and not bad hardware somewhere in the chain.

One thing I did notice is that the driver they provide is not XP certified. So am I going nuts? Or could it be the driver? I've messed with the levels alot, making sure I didn't have mic sensitivity too high, or sound volumes to high, etc.... the issues are still there even at the lowest possible settings where I can just barely hear/be heard when testing with Sound Recorder or over Ventrilo.

I sent in a request to their tech support and haven't heard anything back, so just thought I would check here while I was waiting.