On Sat, 28 Jul 2007, Uli wrote: > Bill Unruh <unruh <at> physics.ubc.ca> writes: > [snip] >> Your better bet is to buy yourself a good set of headphones a small amp and >> a good soundcard. Headphones are far easier to make "good" No small speaker >> ( and I assume you are not going to be mounting 20 litre speakers near your >> computer) can do bass ( simple physics) and no 2 speakers can do 5.1 (not >> that I have any idea what the usefullness of 5.1 is). > > The system does include a subwoofer, sry I forgot to mention that, see > here[1].
That subwoofer is smaller than 1cu ft. There is no way you can get anything under 100Hz from that. Ie, the woofer is a squeeker-- there is nothing sub about it. . > > I do own two sennheiser headphones. A PC sommething headset (also comes with a > soundcard,about 100$) and a fairly old sennheiser hd560 ovation II (was 150$). > But I'd like some surround sound...not sure if there exist decent headphones > that can do that. You have only two ears. The only difference in the sound coming in from the back is a fall off in the high freq response above about 1KHz (shielding by your ears. If you happen to have no outer ears there will be absolutely no difference. If you happen to have sticky out ears, there will be a greated roll off. )Ie, the in ear response can easily be duplicated by earphones with some tweaking of the signals. That $100 soundcard is almost certainly very poor. ( You could try using my testing program www.theory.physics.ubc.ca/soundcard/soundcard.html)) Ie, the biggest problem with headphones is that the separation of sounds is too great. There exist cicuits which will feed one channel to the other side with the right phase and amplitude info. In fact sox has a module included to do that, but that is clearly useful only for preprocessing sound. Ie, a good pair of headphones augmented with sound processing circuitry will almost certainly be more satisfying than that Bose system. Eg, The Grado Labs SR60s ( which have gotten very good reviews) which I have and like will set you back about $70, plus a good soundcard will almost certainly sound better than any $400 system. > > Besides headphones, what would be your suggestion then? > Should I use some cheap sound card with digital output and go for a high > quality > digital amp? And a separate set of 5.1 speakers? > > Not sure what you mean with 5.1 not being useful...what's the alternative if > you > want surround sound? > > > Thanks, > > Uli > > [1] > http://www.bose.com/controller?event=VIEW_PRODUCT_PAGE_EVENT&product=companion5_multimedia_index > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ Alsa-user mailing list Alsa-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/alsa-user
