Toronto-Will t1_iy4qtal wrote on November 28, 2022 at 7:10 PM

Reply to comment by Injoemomma in Anyone else playing warzone with stereo headphones? …….Taking a break from playing until next Thursday for Warzone2. I hope to continue to maximize my competitive advantage with these HD800s. I can hear other players before they hear me. by [deleted]

They require a lot of power relative to something like an IEM that's hyper-sensitive, but like, I can run it off my iPhone with the Apple Dongle and it's comfortably loud at ~85% of max volume.

A bit more headroom than that is optimal, you can get issues with uneven frequency response when you're near an amp's max volume (bass is relatively power thirsty, as I understand it, and there are transient peaks in music that need more power), but especially for something like gaming, I think you'd honestly be *fine* with just an apple dongle (the US version, the EU version is less powerful).

Call me a hypocrite because I'm running a Monolith DAC/amp with bleeding edge specs and enough wattage to power a small country, but I'd actually prefer to be using a GoXLR Mini for gaming; I only put my GoXLR away because the audio kept dropping out, and despite trying 15 different things I couldn't fix it.

If I had it to do over, I'd never buy the GoXLR or the Monolith, and would instead get a Motu M2. I have it on my Amazon wish list even now, but it'd be pointless because of all the money I've sunk into other things. A combo mic amp and headphone dac/amp would be one less thing cluttering my desk, and offers the convenience of zero latency mic monitoring as part of the mix.

Injoemomma t1_iy4uobw wrote on November 28, 2022 at 7:36 PM

Wow!!!! Thank you so much! You explain it well so I can understand. I really appreciate your time. That’s another concern of mine, latency. I don’t want to add al this stuff and have extra latency. So the one you mentioned would have less latency? I’ll look it up right now.

Toronto-Will t1_iy55lal wrote on November 28, 2022 at 8:47 PM

I was talking about low latency *mic* monitoring (like, hearing yourself speak into the microphone back into your headphones), since any latency with that, even a few milliseconds, can be noticeable and disorienting.

I've never really looked into latency going to the headphone from the computer. It's absolutely an issue with bluetooth, if you've ever tried watching TV/movies over a bluetooth headset the lip sync being off is noticeable, but it's never been something that I've perceived as an issue with wired headphones.

Doing some searching, it seems like ASIO drivers give you the ability to minimize latency, and there's something called ASIO4all that works universally, if your dac manufacturer doesn't have their own native ASIO driver. But going ASIO would bypass my equalizer, and I need the equalizer to tamp down treble that would otherwise hurt my ears. I found an audio latency test on Youtube, and even in my setup that's not optimized for the lowest possible sound latency, it is still perfectly synced with the video. Remember there is latency in the video rendering, too, so you almost want some lag in the audio rendering to keep them in sync.