Astro mixamp with highend headphones

[AiZZe]

Hello gent's

I have a question that have been bugging me for a while now and i cant find a direct answer. First off I have been looking around for some highend headphones for gaming with attachable boom mic.

The new setup will be a replacement for my current steelseries h headset. But I love the mixamp on the steelseries basestation for adjusting voice and game volume on the fly.

That's why I have been looking at the astro mixamp and I'm wondering what happens if I use a soundcard from the computer to the mixamp is there a way to pass through the amp so I get the benefits from the soundcard instead of the external soundcard in the astro mixamp?

Best regards John

 

[c4s2k3]

I think the Astro mixamps do surround via the optical output. They don't have multiple analog inputs (Front L/R, Center, Sub, Rear L/R) so you would not be able to route analog sound from a typical sound card through the mix amp, if that's what you mean to do.

I have an older Astro unit and haven't used sound card audio for my headphones at all and frankly, I don't miss it. If you get a nice pair of headphones the quality should be good enough that you won't care you aren't using the sound card. For me it was a plus also because that freed up the analog sound card outputs and have those connected to a surround receiver and speakers for when I want the game *loud*

EDIT: Did you also mean to ask about headphones? I've had a Beyerdynamic DT 990 Pro for several years and am very happy with them. They sound great for music too. The one thing to consider on those is that are high impedance (600 Ohm, I believe) so the mix amp may get maxed out depending on your own preference. I play most games with the mix amp volume around halfway and that seems to work well for me. It's still quite loud and going louder would be uncomfortable for me. They are VERY sturdy, as the headband piece that holds the earpieces is metal. I got tired of having "gaming" headphones break in a year so I spent more to get these. I picked up a cheap wired microphone on amazon and rigged it to the headphones.

 

[faalin]

you can use both soundcard and astro mixamp, but it gets a little tricky. It like using two volume controls on your headphones. If you set the first one to 50%, when it passes to the second volume control it thinks the new signal is for 0-100% when in reality its only 0-50%. So if you set both to 50% your really only getting 25% of the full Volume.

 

[AiZZe]

Ok thank you guys for the answers! Reallyou appreciate it! I have been looking on a few headsets.

Beyerdynamic DT770
Audio Technica ATH-M50XMG
Sennheiser HD 599
V-MODA Crossfade M-100
With either

V-Moda Boompro Microphone or
Antlion Audio ModMic 4.0 Uni

Think I'm going to be a little shit and order all of them only to try them all out and decide which one to keep any recommendation?

But If I just were to simplifying my question is it worth it running the headsets mentioned above on a dedicated soundcard or would I be just as good running it trough the amp. What would you guys do?

 

[c4s2k3]

I honestly don't think it will make much difference in terms of sound quality (modern sound card vs. mix amp) aside from possibly a volume difference. But the mix amp gets you virtual "surround" when gaming. Unless I'm missing something, the headphones would only be connected to the "front" (or main) analog outputs on the sound card. I believe there are some software options for virtual surround over 2-channel stereo but I have no experience with those. If you don't care about surround, you could just try the headphones on sound card, then on mix amp (with surround turned off, a button an an Astro) and see which you prefer.

 

[faalin]

Well i run a Creative Sound Blaster ZxR sound card which has a built in amp and use a pair of shure 750DJ headphones, so really cant comment on what you want to buy but i like my setup.

 

[AiZZe]

Yes i see c4s2k3...i guess I'll go for the mixamp since I will definitely get a far better sound quality compare to the steelseries H. And the option to adjust the voice/in game sound while gaming is very important for me. I do understand you faalin but there might be someone that has the headphones I mentioned above that can comment on this.