Hello everyone… I don’t know if I’m in the right subreddit but help would be really appreciated. I see in this forum a lot of recommendations on getting certain headphones and DAC/AMPs and so on. I’m now able to start getting better stuff for myself and for my pc and gaming I got a PC38x as I’ve seen it is a good headset…
I got in my PC a Soundblaster Z sound card (it is not DAC/AMP) and I’ve been using the SBX profile for allI do… I don’t know if I have been wasting audio quality or anything using these settings. I don’t really know much of EQ or whatever.
I’ve tried without it and it seems audio is a little low… I know everyone says these headphones can be driven without AMPs but it seems fairly low to me… unless I crank the volume knob up in which sounds very loud xD
Anyways… I even tried Dolby Atmos to attempt get better sound… positioning or whatever… but what I don’t want to do is to get used to bad equalizing or bad audio because of me using software or whatever… how do I know that I’m getting good audio as it is expected?
So… what is the recommendation? should I keep using my soundcard? is SBX profiles good and what can I get recommended?.. is raw audio better?..
I’m just… confused
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Technically, the Soundblaster is a DAC and amplifier. Anything that can play digital audio must have some sort of DAC and some sort of amplifier.
I think the sound card functions as a dac already, not sure if it’s an amp, but the pc38x has low impedance and high sensitivity which makes it easy to drive and probably doesn’t need a dedicated external amp. I’m confused when you say the audio is too low but when you increase the volume knob, it becomes too loud so driving isn’t an issue, just find a healthy middle ground by slowly adjusting both while listening to some songs.
Regarding sound quality itself, this becomes a lot more subjective. Try to set your sbx profile to something neutral or turned off first, then go from there. In general as long as there’s no obvious crackling, distorted sound or channel imbalance where one side is louder than the other side (unless the song itself does that), that means it’s working fine. You would have to describe in better detail what makes you think the “audio sound bad”. Does it lack bass? Voices sound muffled? High end notes too strong or too weak? All of these are less of the headphones being broken and more of headphones having their own sound (frequency response). PC38x is rather neutral with the bass mostly flat and rolled off, while a lot of gaming headsets have boosted bass so a person who likes bass may dislike the pc38x because of it.
Next is mostly subjective, what kind of songs do you listen to? People who like hiphop and rnb usually enjoy bass while other genres like classical may not care as much about it. Individual preference matters a lot here. Here you can start experimenting with your Sbx or eq software, just grab some of your favorite songs and A-B listen to them with certain profiles on or off. EQ isn’t inherently bad, sometimes you have a headphone you enjoy but just wish it had more oomph in some places so you start using EQ. If you don’t want to use EQ that’s also fine, try the headphones with the eq/sbx settings at neutral or off for a week or 2 and you might get used to it. I started using an open back this year and going back to my old headsets, I felt they are now too bassy when previously I was fine with them.
thank you very much. I don’t listen to music much but I watch movies and play videogames. I’ll try some things mentioned here and check how much I like or dislike what I hear with the profiles
I’ve had a good experience lately with Steel Series Sonar software. I use a Syba Sonic and mix of IEMs and Sennheiser HD560S, depending on my mood. Sonar lets me set whatever EQ I want.