My intarweb blog.

Yesterday i received my new headphones for my  pc. Ive gotten tired of the razer barracuda i was useing. Its not a bad headset but the sound isnt all that great. The major reason I was sick of it was the microphone being to weak. I needed to use a 20db boost in windows to make it useable on ventrilo. That function gives an annoying echo in the sound of the  headset. It will picks up every sound with the microphone, and youll hear that back the same second on the headphones.

The thing i notice really is that headsets often have the problem of compromise. The ones with a good microphone tend to have bad sound, or a flawed design. The ones with a good sound have a bad microphone. For example:

Sennheiser pc130, of which the microphone “arm” was dead within a month

Plantronic s90, which cable is to easily damaged, after which the sound will never be the same.

Plantronic audio 350, which i couldnt test long because its weird square shape was designed to utterly obliterate  earshells. This thing was designed in guantanamo bay!

So i bought a Sennheiser HD 415 headphone, and i must say the sound quality really suprised me. Its also a very  comfortable headphone, but of course theres no microphone attached to it since its a normal headphone. So i needed a stand alone microphone. At first i was very sceptical. My original experiances with stand alone microphones years ago learned me that they were generally very bad in quality. They either didnt have enough sound to make me understandable, or they had bad noise cencalation. A  fellow NeXT member pointed out to me that the solution was very simple and cost less then 6 euros.  The Zalman ZM-Mic 1 is easily attached the normal cord of my headphones, and if your not as handy as me you can always fix it with excess use of duct tape. The mike is sensitive enough for me not to use the mike boosting function that would fuck up my sound quality. It allows me to yell obscene things to people all arround the world who can now actually hear what im yelling about.