Nice video! I am glad that you are feeling better. Have you ever thought about reviewing the Smyth Research A16 Realiser? It is a 3D headphone processor and it seems like it would be amazing if it worked as advertised, but it costs $4,695 USD.
Great vid as usual Re the Rog Phoebus on driver 4.29 theres a firmware update..,check out the Turtle Beach ELite Pro 2 with the external usb Superamp its excellent
Good to know its shitty as i expected. But when you show usb connector to connect headphones to dac, thats break me, its useless without a orginal headphones. Maybe you try review Audiotrak Prodigy Cube, its preety old but i heard good things about this card.
As far as I know you dont really need the "gaming mode" or actually the PC mode (You must have mixed up something). You always should go for hi res mode anyways. The chat mix is a nice to have but im not really using it anyways. Discord or even teamspeak lets you adjust the volume anyways. And also DTS or all the other surround sound technologies are bullshit for headsets/ headphones anyways. The surround mode gives you really weird sound if you play games with actual 3D sound options on - even if you play on stereo only. The reason is here that surround sound like DTS is just a bad joke just to have a cool sounding point like "Look we offer you DTS". Why? Because almost every game offers you surround sound compressed and from the original source (the game lol). If you use DTS together with other sound options then it will just be broken and sound really bad. The next problem is that people are really missinformed about this topic. You just cant play a game with stereo output, but mix it on your DAC to surround. It makes no sense and also it will give you fake weird sound in games like CS2 or overwatch. The way to go is always to use the mainsource (So your game) for audio processing. Everything else makes no sense like explained above. I just switched from my arctis pro wireless to the arctis pro wired + DAC, because the white noise punched my ears after longer sessions. Dont get the wirless version of the arctis pro because you wont be happy with it if you do longer sessions on your PC or console. You should go for the wired version or for the arctis 9 wireless (The audio quality is worse on the arctis 9 compared to the pro, but you dont have white noise - only on the highest volume settings which I wouldnt suggest anyways). Also I get the arctis pro tomorrow and then I will check the hi res mode, because its kinda strange that you just say that you dont heard any difference, since there should be a difference if you listen to hi res audio. I think the problem with hi res is that a lot of people dont really know how audio works (Dont get me wrong, im a noob but I know enough to explain). Most games audio is produced in 16bit /44.1kHz. AAA titles are using 24 bit/ 48kHz rates - like movies. So if you just put on a random game then you wont hear a difference or not a huge difference at all, if the games audio quality is CD quality and not hi res. Music seems to make a turn in quality with tidal. There you can actually listen to hi res quality and you probably will hear the difference lol - cant really proof it now, but I will try it out the next days and make an edit here. Well sadly audio is a really complex topic - but not because its hard to understand, the problem is that there isnt really a standard for devs or other producers since everyone makes it how he likes to. The biggest difference should be for you if you producing music by yourself and youre really into it and you have experience. But since this is a gaming headset I dont really know if there are better alternatives to this. (Because this headset is already really really balanced in the highs and the base, its crazy).
Thank you for the lengthy comment! I enjoyed reading it and I agree with you on a lot of points. But audio is a really complex thing to review, that's why I always include a more objective measurement like Rightmark. Because what I may love, you may hate and vice versa. I wonder what you think of the Arctis Pro!
@@AntonsHardware I will try to keep it short and clean. I tested a lot of music, even special hi res music (96kHz 26bits) (everything in FLAC to avoid compressed quality fake results) and first I heard no difference between the default: 16bit, 40.000kHz and the hi res mode: 24bit, 96.000kHz because I switched through the windows settings and also tried everything out with my pot player. BUT THEN I started playing around with the DAC and switched between the PC input and the hi res inputs and then I realised how ten times clearer everything sound. In music tracks its a little bit harder to hear, thats the reason why I thought its a placebo at first, so I tested it in games like Hitman 3 (only hitman 3 at this point because Hitman 3 is one of the games that are providing you uncompressed audio quality and let you choose the dynamic range etc) and its actually crazy how big the difference is. The sound of the hi res mode is a lot clearer (it had less aliasing). Also you heard the different sound sources much clearer like birds, wind, shots - the dynamic range was better. Im pretty sure that games like ow2 wont give you such uncompressed sound quality at all. This games sound is poor af compared to other games like rainbow six siege that provides you uncompressed sound. Is the headset woth the money? Totally, but I would actually not suggest anyone to go for the wireless version. Sadly steelseries messed the wireless version completely up and nobody knows why. Headsets like the Arctis 9 wireless or the arctis 7 never had problems with white noise (if you not turning it up to the full limit what you should avoid anyways) but the arctis pro wireless was really frustrating and disapointing to use because of the white noise - even if you turned down the volume on the headset / DAC. its simply not worth the 300 bucks with this strange and loud white noise. Maybe the white noise is just there because of the high bandwith (40.000Hz) that the DAC is streaming to the headphones - this would actually explain why other headphones with less resolution never had this problem and why the wireless resolution on the new nova pro series got reduced to 20.000Hz aswell. Also the hi res topic is really confusing. Sadly a lot of companies abuse this and also every tech youtuber says weird stuff about hi res or about DACs in generell (or they dont even talk about the DACs because they dont know why the fuck its existing XD...). I know that tech youtuber are not really techy anyways since theyre only existing for money and clicks or product placements (it sounds kinda horrible but I dont mean you with this, Im talking about big big youtuber, youre providing nice self made testing results what is actually REALLY unique here on youtube, I mean tell me someone who is doing this if its about sound XD right?). Nobody is talking about the Nyquist theorem, the aliasing or what a DAC is actually doing with the 24bit 96.000Hz mode and why you still hear the difference on 40.000Hz headphones. I wish more people would provide more education here on youtube when its about sound or atleast basic knoweledge.
@@RealTastyTaste Thanks for your input! I upgraded my Arctis Pro from chatmix to GameDac and had some higher quality .flac music laying around. Listening to that I think I heard more clearer sound with HiRes, for simple .mp3 it's obviously the same. Still, like everyone here said its hard thing to pinpoint. And still, need to find games to test with better sound output like your mentioned Hitman 3. Also about Arctis Pro wireless, I heard a lot flaws about them and they would feel outdated to buy these days. I am thinking about Arctis Nova Pro wireless, because I am tired of those wires, lol! But still believe that best audio quality is from wired headphone, so I don't want to be disappointment when switching from these awesome Arctis Pro.
@@unrealman657 Well I actually hate cables aswell but cables still provide the better performance / quality. I took my lazy ass and did some cable management on my setup and now it looks fine and is actually not annoying me anymore. Anyways, if you go for the wireless nova pro then keep in mind that the frequency respond is only 10-22,000 Hz in wireless mode ( I think its because of the white noise problem that the arctis pro wireless have).
@@RealTastyTaste after only dreaming about nova pro wireless , today I finally researched them, and you are right, it's a shame they downgraded from 40 kHz.. I guess I need to fiddle around with cables and call it a day :)
