This is not really a review. It is more an experience. Anyway, here it is. There are no images in this review, since you can umpteen number of them anywhere on the Web.
I have never had any kind of surround speakers. I initially had a pair of Mercury MS-440 speakers that came along with the system and sometime later, someone presented me with a pair of Philips SBC-HP090 stereo headphones. I haven't even listened to a surround setup attached to a computer, although I have listened to a home theatre system. I have always shunned full blown speaker systems simply because they would disturb everyone around me while I was negotiating some bloody dark corridor in Doom 3 with some serious sound effects going on in the background. I have preferred headphones since they are private and never disturb anyone. Of course, it also means that no one can disturb you (at least not too much), but that is all to the good.
I recently saw a thread here on TE about 5.1 surround headphones. That set me wondering. How would it sound to play Doom 3 / Half Life 2 / Far Cry with surround sound? Since I did not want external speakers, surround headsets sounded exactly like what I was looking for.
The hunt for the headset
Before I could listen to it, I had to locate a good surround headset. Off I went googling and found quite a few of them. Some of them like the Sennheiser was way above what I wanted to pay (one pair listed at $149) and some of them like the iSound did not have any good reviews. Most of them were not even available in India. So the list narrowed down to:
1) iSound 5.1 Home Theatre
2) Gainward Sound xPlosion 5.1
3) Zalman Theatre 6 RS6F
All three were reviewed at TechTree and I dropped the iSound from the list because of the review. I asked a few dealers about the other two models and drew blanks everywhere. "5.1 headphones? No sir, we have 5.1 speakers if you want..." was the general refrain. Since MediaTech are Gainward's distributors in India, I contacted their Mumbai office and they gave me a Bangalore number to contact. I spoke to the guy there and to my surprise, he said that the Gainward was out of stock, but he had the Zalman! I could not believe my luck, so I went over immediately and forked out Rs.2600/- for the Theatre 6. Now I was the proud owner of a quality product (at least according to the reviews I had read so far).
Setting it up
Got home with the booty and unpacked them from their funky hemispherical package. Instead of the single 3.5mm jack connector I was used to seeing, I now had three 3.5mm jacks at the end of a nearly 9 feet long cable. Ah ha, the fold-out pamphlet from Zalman says which colored connector should go where.
My system is:
AMD A64 3000+ NewCastle (S754)
ASUS K8NE-Deluxe with nForce3 250Gb
2 x 512 MB Hynix PC3200 RAM
XFX GeForce 6600GT AGP 8x
80 GB Seagate SATA HDD
Windows XP SP2
The mobo has onboard 7.1 Realtek AC97 sound. But the socket colors and the jack colors did not match. Out came the hitherto unread mobo manual and it is very clearly printed that if you want to connect a 6 channel speaker system to this mobo, the jacks go here, here and here. So I connected them according to the instructions and got ready to play some games.
First experience
Right, the first thing I fired up was Doom 3. I had finished this game a couple of months back, but I wanted to check the sound with this baby. Went to the "System" settings and changed "Surround speakers" from No to Yes. Doom 3 immediately comes back and says "Surround speakers not detected. Go check in the Control Panel" (or something very similar). Exited Doom 3, went to Control Panel and changed speaker setup from Headphones to "5.1 surround sound speakers". Went back to Doom 3 and now it recognized the surround speakers. OK, selected a save point at random and loaded the game. Hmmm, this is not so good. The games sounds almost as though it were being played underwater, like Aquanox or something. Any iteractive voice, like the audio logs from a PDA, echoes so much that it is almost unitelligible. The gun firing sounds are awesome though. And the moment I turn away from a character, the voice level drops to almost zero. I figured that this must mean the so called "Rear" speakers were either not functioning or not getting enough feed.
Came out of Doom 3 and loaded Half Life 2. What the heck? Same thing is happening here too. All voices sound like as though I am hearing them from inside a pool. Gun shots are good, deep and ear shattering. But that is about all. This is not sounding so hot.
First experience not so good. Now I have doubts in my mind. Did I blow away the 2.6K?
Some R&D
The Realtek driver also has a Control Panel applet called the "Sound effect manager". I loaded that and asked it to do an auto check. It says that everything is connected properly. When I run the test, I can hear the left and right channels really loud but the rear and front channels are almost inaudible and the Center/Subwoofer is not audible at all. Faulty headset? I thought it was too early to decide that, let me try a few more things.
First, I tried reducing the "Front" volume and increasing the "Subwoofer", "Center" and "Rear" volumes. Better, but not exactly good. Any combination in the Windows "Volume Control" dialog is not resulting in good sound. So I set everything to max and came out of it.
The Sound Effect manager has something called "Environment" where you can select the quality of sound like Underwater, Padded cell (maybe needed for some of us here), Sewer Pipe, Arena, Theatre, etc. One good thing is that you can customize the sound output by changing any of the 12 parameters like, Reflections, Reverb, Diffusion, Density, etc. I am not saying that I understood how exactly each parameter affects the sound output but some of them are quite obvious. Setting Reverb to high results in heavy echoes being generated and so on. After fiddling with the settings for some time, I thought I have arrived at the right configuration. The auto check sounds on all 6 speakers are clearly audible and directional too. Saved the configuration and exited the Manager.
Next experience
Back in Doom 3 again. This time the sound is simply awesome. You can really, really hear that zombie creeping up on you from behind. That distant metallic wrenching actually sounds like it is coming from somewhere in the next building. Man, I want to replay Doom 3 from the beginning just for the sound. It is so much more creepier. It never sounded anything like this with my old stereo headpones. Now it actually sounds menacing, almost like it is alive.
Now I am in Half Life 2. The sound is great here too, but nothing like Doom 3. HL2 is a much more placid game, if you ask me. Nothing scary here. Alyx, Barney and co wander around my head while we are fighting together. That dropship really sounds like it is flying overhead, not somewhere in front of you. The bullets whiz by you and almost feel like turning around physically. Oh, this is going to be so much more fun.
Music
I dont use my computer to listen to music much, I mostly do that while driving to work and on the way back. However, I wanted to check the output from WinAmp without any plugins. I tried some M.S.Subbulakshmi, Kishore Kumar, Eric Clapton, Kenny G, Billy Ocean, Beethoven and even some fusion music. Yeah, my music collection is pretty eclectic. I am not a great fan of any one genre, I like them all equally.
All of them sound very good on the headset, although I must say that unless you continually fiddle with the graphic equalizer for each genre you wont get the best out of the speakers. The bass reproduction in the headset is phenomenal, but the high treble sounds are not as high or as sharp as they ought to be. Mid-range and vocals come out very clear as well. Speaker clarity is wonderful even at full volume. Of course, at full volume I can only listen to them if they are off my head. The sound level is simply too much (nearly 90db according to the specifications, I can only translate that as "too loud"). There is no hiss at any stage or volume level, although you can hear some very faint crackling noises at times. I put that down to some electronic disturbance from the various gadgets that are in the room.
Movies
I haven't tried watching DVDs with this headset on, so I cant comment on surround sound in movies. Trying it out with any rented DVD is stupid since most of them are pirated or screen prints anyway. I will wait until I get hold of any original DVD which sports multi channel recording and then watch/listen to that.
Conclusion
Never having owned a surround speaker system might have biased my experience a little. But, be that as it may, this headset is the best sound I have listened to in a game. I will never go back to stereo speakers again. It may not be a complete all round surround headset, but is certainly the one you are looking for if you are mainly into playing games on your system.
A touch expensive for a headset, but then they are Zalman!
Setting it up is easy, but getting it to work right is somewhat a hit and miss method. It probably varies form person to person, but if an application that could auto-set these parameters accompanied the product it would have been better. For the price I am paying, this would be the least I expect. There is absolutely no additional stuff (like demo CDs, etc.) that come along with the headset. There is a multi-lingual printed fold-out sheet that tells you how and what to do to get sound on your headset, but nothing on how to ensure that you get the correct sound. But I am just cribbing for its own sake.
Rating
I rate this product 9.0 out of 10.
I have never had any kind of surround speakers. I initially had a pair of Mercury MS-440 speakers that came along with the system and sometime later, someone presented me with a pair of Philips SBC-HP090 stereo headphones. I haven't even listened to a surround setup attached to a computer, although I have listened to a home theatre system. I have always shunned full blown speaker systems simply because they would disturb everyone around me while I was negotiating some bloody dark corridor in Doom 3 with some serious sound effects going on in the background. I have preferred headphones since they are private and never disturb anyone. Of course, it also means that no one can disturb you (at least not too much), but that is all to the good.
I recently saw a thread here on TE about 5.1 surround headphones. That set me wondering. How would it sound to play Doom 3 / Half Life 2 / Far Cry with surround sound? Since I did not want external speakers, surround headsets sounded exactly like what I was looking for.
The hunt for the headset
Before I could listen to it, I had to locate a good surround headset. Off I went googling and found quite a few of them. Some of them like the Sennheiser was way above what I wanted to pay (one pair listed at $149) and some of them like the iSound did not have any good reviews. Most of them were not even available in India. So the list narrowed down to:
1) iSound 5.1 Home Theatre
2) Gainward Sound xPlosion 5.1
3) Zalman Theatre 6 RS6F
All three were reviewed at TechTree and I dropped the iSound from the list because of the review. I asked a few dealers about the other two models and drew blanks everywhere. "5.1 headphones? No sir, we have 5.1 speakers if you want..." was the general refrain. Since MediaTech are Gainward's distributors in India, I contacted their Mumbai office and they gave me a Bangalore number to contact. I spoke to the guy there and to my surprise, he said that the Gainward was out of stock, but he had the Zalman! I could not believe my luck, so I went over immediately and forked out Rs.2600/- for the Theatre 6. Now I was the proud owner of a quality product (at least according to the reviews I had read so far).
Setting it up
Got home with the booty and unpacked them from their funky hemispherical package. Instead of the single 3.5mm jack connector I was used to seeing, I now had three 3.5mm jacks at the end of a nearly 9 feet long cable. Ah ha, the fold-out pamphlet from Zalman says which colored connector should go where.
My system is:
AMD A64 3000+ NewCastle (S754)
ASUS K8NE-Deluxe with nForce3 250Gb
2 x 512 MB Hynix PC3200 RAM
XFX GeForce 6600GT AGP 8x
80 GB Seagate SATA HDD
Windows XP SP2
The mobo has onboard 7.1 Realtek AC97 sound. But the socket colors and the jack colors did not match. Out came the hitherto unread mobo manual and it is very clearly printed that if you want to connect a 6 channel speaker system to this mobo, the jacks go here, here and here. So I connected them according to the instructions and got ready to play some games.
First experience
Right, the first thing I fired up was Doom 3. I had finished this game a couple of months back, but I wanted to check the sound with this baby. Went to the "System" settings and changed "Surround speakers" from No to Yes. Doom 3 immediately comes back and says "Surround speakers not detected. Go check in the Control Panel" (or something very similar). Exited Doom 3, went to Control Panel and changed speaker setup from Headphones to "5.1 surround sound speakers". Went back to Doom 3 and now it recognized the surround speakers. OK, selected a save point at random and loaded the game. Hmmm, this is not so good. The games sounds almost as though it were being played underwater, like Aquanox or something. Any iteractive voice, like the audio logs from a PDA, echoes so much that it is almost unitelligible. The gun firing sounds are awesome though. And the moment I turn away from a character, the voice level drops to almost zero. I figured that this must mean the so called "Rear" speakers were either not functioning or not getting enough feed.
Came out of Doom 3 and loaded Half Life 2. What the heck? Same thing is happening here too. All voices sound like as though I am hearing them from inside a pool. Gun shots are good, deep and ear shattering. But that is about all. This is not sounding so hot.
First experience not so good. Now I have doubts in my mind. Did I blow away the 2.6K?
Some R&D
The Realtek driver also has a Control Panel applet called the "Sound effect manager". I loaded that and asked it to do an auto check. It says that everything is connected properly. When I run the test, I can hear the left and right channels really loud but the rear and front channels are almost inaudible and the Center/Subwoofer is not audible at all. Faulty headset? I thought it was too early to decide that, let me try a few more things.
First, I tried reducing the "Front" volume and increasing the "Subwoofer", "Center" and "Rear" volumes. Better, but not exactly good. Any combination in the Windows "Volume Control" dialog is not resulting in good sound. So I set everything to max and came out of it.
The Sound Effect manager has something called "Environment" where you can select the quality of sound like Underwater, Padded cell (maybe needed for some of us here), Sewer Pipe, Arena, Theatre, etc. One good thing is that you can customize the sound output by changing any of the 12 parameters like, Reflections, Reverb, Diffusion, Density, etc. I am not saying that I understood how exactly each parameter affects the sound output but some of them are quite obvious. Setting Reverb to high results in heavy echoes being generated and so on. After fiddling with the settings for some time, I thought I have arrived at the right configuration. The auto check sounds on all 6 speakers are clearly audible and directional too. Saved the configuration and exited the Manager.
Next experience
Back in Doom 3 again. This time the sound is simply awesome. You can really, really hear that zombie creeping up on you from behind. That distant metallic wrenching actually sounds like it is coming from somewhere in the next building. Man, I want to replay Doom 3 from the beginning just for the sound. It is so much more creepier. It never sounded anything like this with my old stereo headpones. Now it actually sounds menacing, almost like it is alive.
Now I am in Half Life 2. The sound is great here too, but nothing like Doom 3. HL2 is a much more placid game, if you ask me. Nothing scary here. Alyx, Barney and co wander around my head while we are fighting together. That dropship really sounds like it is flying overhead, not somewhere in front of you. The bullets whiz by you and almost feel like turning around physically. Oh, this is going to be so much more fun.
Music
I dont use my computer to listen to music much, I mostly do that while driving to work and on the way back. However, I wanted to check the output from WinAmp without any plugins. I tried some M.S.Subbulakshmi, Kishore Kumar, Eric Clapton, Kenny G, Billy Ocean, Beethoven and even some fusion music. Yeah, my music collection is pretty eclectic. I am not a great fan of any one genre, I like them all equally.
All of them sound very good on the headset, although I must say that unless you continually fiddle with the graphic equalizer for each genre you wont get the best out of the speakers. The bass reproduction in the headset is phenomenal, but the high treble sounds are not as high or as sharp as they ought to be. Mid-range and vocals come out very clear as well. Speaker clarity is wonderful even at full volume. Of course, at full volume I can only listen to them if they are off my head. The sound level is simply too much (nearly 90db according to the specifications, I can only translate that as "too loud"). There is no hiss at any stage or volume level, although you can hear some very faint crackling noises at times. I put that down to some electronic disturbance from the various gadgets that are in the room.
Movies
I haven't tried watching DVDs with this headset on, so I cant comment on surround sound in movies. Trying it out with any rented DVD is stupid since most of them are pirated or screen prints anyway. I will wait until I get hold of any original DVD which sports multi channel recording and then watch/listen to that.
Conclusion
Never having owned a surround speaker system might have biased my experience a little. But, be that as it may, this headset is the best sound I have listened to in a game. I will never go back to stereo speakers again. It may not be a complete all round surround headset, but is certainly the one you are looking for if you are mainly into playing games on your system.
A touch expensive for a headset, but then they are Zalman!
Setting it up is easy, but getting it to work right is somewhat a hit and miss method. It probably varies form person to person, but if an application that could auto-set these parameters accompanied the product it would have been better. For the price I am paying, this would be the least I expect. There is absolutely no additional stuff (like demo CDs, etc.) that come along with the headset. There is a multi-lingual printed fold-out sheet that tells you how and what to do to get sound on your headset, but nothing on how to ensure that you get the correct sound. But I am just cribbing for its own sake.
Rating
I rate this product 9.0 out of 10.
