Speed- Link Medusa 5. Home Edition (SL- 8. Headset Review » Page 5 - Testing. Testing. Music. Music seemed to be a good starting point for the testing, as I could try out a wide range of tracks that I am very familiar with. I listen to music every day on both my home system, made up of hi- fi separates, speaker and headphones, as well as portable audio including a different set of headphones, mp. Having such a wide range of audio devices and experience working with club sound systems really helped me when assessing and "tuning- in" the myriad of controls available. One of the key aims of this particular area of testing was to bring the headset frequency response as close to my hi- fi separates and portable audio as possible and, at the same time, find the settings that allowed me to drive the headset as loud as possible without distortion. A balance of power, frequency response, and clarity, is something I aim to achieve with all audio equipment and I wasn't going to drop my standards for the Medusa headset. Test tracks. I selected a number of music tracks that are particularly loud with very tough bass content to fine tune the sound controls of the soundcard and mp. This selection of tracks produced distortion easier than most other tracks when driving the headset at high volumes and proved to be very useful for fine tuning the bass and EQ settings to allow distortion- free playback of all musical sources. Breaks / Hip- Hop. Speed-Link Medusa 5.1 Home Edition SL-8796 review. balrithor. Views 14 Likes Comments Comment. Like if this guide is helpful. I eventually came across the Speed-Link Medusa 5.1 Home Edition [SL-8796] and, after plenty of. Medusa 5.1 headset with amplifier for simultaneous connection to a 5.1 soundcard, dditional connectivity for a 5.1 speaker system, Padded and height adjustable headband. We have 6 reviews of Speed-Link Medusa 5.1 Home Edition SL-8796 and the average score is 95%. View all reviews, videos, ratings and awards for speedlinkmedusa51homeeditionsl8796. Switch to the UK edition switch to the AU edition switch to the INT edition. Medusa by Michael Dibdin Faber. gregarious detectives with happy home lives who eat and drink any old crap and do everything by the book. This review is going to be taking a look at Speed-Link's top of the line headset, the Medusa 5.1 Home Edition. I was intrigued by the surround sound and the overall popularity of the entire Medusa 5.1 series on computer and. Speed-Link Medusa 5.1 Home Edition (SL-8796) Headset Review. hardnrg - February 18, 2007. to the Medusa 5.1 Home headset's credit. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition Review » all reviews. Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for Speed-Link MEDUSA 5.1 Home Edition Headset at Amazon.com. Read honest and unbiased product reviews from our users./>. Speed-Link MEDUSA 5.1 Home Edition Headset: Amazon.co.uk. Average Customer Review. I like audio hub/switch which comes with Medusa Home edition. This is an in-depth review and guide to the Speed-Link Medusa 5.1 Home Edition [SL-8796]. It is a high quality headset (with microphone) with 4 speakers built into each cup for true 5.1 surround sound. Hopefully this will be. Baobinga - The Bashment Track. Mr Scruff - Shelf Wobbler. Azzido Da Bass - Dooms Night (Timo Maas Remix)DJ Deekline And Ed Solo - Touch Your Toes. Mr Oizo - Flat Beat Drum n Bass. Aphrodite - Chinois. Alex Reece - Pulp Fiction (Lemon D Remix)Brockie & Ed Solo - System Check Hardcore. Nukleuz Kollective Pres Cortina - Take Me Higher (Sy & Unknown Hardcore Mix)Praga Khan - Injected With A Poison (Hixxy Remix)Dougal & Gammer - X- Treme (Exclusive Clubland Remix) Techno. Dub Taylor - Something, Sometimes. The Delta - MJ. Error. Huntemann - Discotech (Monika Kruse @ Voodooamt Remix)Umek - Posing As Me. The musical testing was by no means limited to these tracks and I auditioned the headset for many, many hours over a wide range of music including much less "heavy" tracks that were also demanding in other ways that helped fine- tune the mid to high frequency ranges. Results: optimal settings for Audigy. ZS soundcard. It took some time to adjust the Audigy. ZS's controls to give a slightly better frequency response. The headset is very capable of an energetic and involved performance while maintaining detail and clarity, but a little bit of tweaking is required to supply the amp with just the right input signal to achieve the best sound. With the centre/sub channels connected to the amp normally, I could not achieve a decent balance between the lower frequencies produced by the subwoofer and the front channels. The sub certainly was producing bass, but almost to the point of being sub- sonic! The headset was pulsating with the bass enormously, and yet there was a lot of lower end bass missing. After trying every combination of soundcard settings possible and reading several forums for recommended settings, I tried swapping the centre and sub channels by using a 3. While the bass problem was solved, I therefore "lost" the centre channel as it was now being fed by the subwoofer output. There seems to be a problem with the Audigy 2 drivers in that you have to choose between having a centre channel and zero subwoofer output (bass redirection: off), a centre channel and sub- sonic subwoofer output (bass redirection: on), or no centre channel and balanced subwoofer and other channel bass reproduction. Here are the settings of the soundcard's mixer, bass management, graphic EQ, and surround up- mixing panels: Mixer Volume: 5. Bass: 8. 4%Treble: 5. Source (Wave): 7. Graphic EQ 1. 25 Hz: +2. B2. 50 Hz: - 1. 2. B5. 00 Hz: - 1. 0. B1 k. Hz: +1. 1. 0d. B2 k. Hz: +1. 8. 2d. B4 k. Hz: +2. 5. 7d. B8k. Hz: +4. 9. 1d. BPreamp: - 1. 3. 3d. BBass Management Subwoofer volume: 1. Bass redirection: enabled. Crossover frequency: 1. Hz. Creative Multi Speaker Surround (CMSS) Enable CMSS 3. D: enabled. Mode: CMSSStereo focus: 0%Contrary to conventional wisdom, the crossover for the "subwoofer" performs best when set at 1. Hz. Increasing the value only reduces the amount of bass sent to the subwoofer channel! This is because it is actually being driven by the centre channel output. Another odd anomaly is that the amp produces an audible hiss at low volumes (0~2. It is only really noticeable in the 0~1. I had the amp at somewhere around 2. Stereo sources such as mp. Audigy. 2 ZS. CMSS 3. D up- mixing (stereo to 5. CMSS needs to be turned off for movies and games, it's more convenient to just keep CMSS off all the time, and it still sounds great! When CMSS is enabled, the headset has slightly more bass extension thanks to routing the bass to the sub speakers, but the room simulation effect can sound a little strange at times. In short, using the "front" left and right channels alone is only very slightly inferior to using all the channels for music. So if you are lazy like me, you can just leave CMSS disabled (it has to be disabled for listening to true 5. Results: optimal settings for i. River i. FP- 8. 99 MP3 player. As the Medusa headset comes with an adapter for stereo- only sources, I thought it would be interesting to see how they fared without the amp and no 3. D up- mixing / matrixing. Graphic EQ5. 0 Hz: +1. B2. 00 Hz: - 3d. B1 k. Hz: 0d. B3 k. Hz: +3d. B1. 4 k. Hz: +6d. BI think the d. B ratings on the MP3 player's EQ settings are somewhat arbitrary as applying a +1. B boost to a band centred around 5. Hz would normally be asking for trouble. So I think rather the shape of the corrective EQ curve is the most meaningful thing here. It is extremely similar to the EQ settings I use with my Koss Portapro headphones and, to the Medusa 5. Home headset's credit, the sound produced from the headphones is impressively close to that of the Portapro's. The Medusa headset is noticeably quieter at the same volume however, and the bass extension isn't quite as deep. This seems to indicate that the headset would fare better when driven from an amplifier as the same characteristics can be heard when trying to drive Sennheiser HD5. While I had the headset connected to my MP3 player, and since it has a line- in/mic socket, I decided to connect the headset mic and try out the voice recording feature. This MP3 player does real- time encoding up to 3. Hz sample rate. Even at the lowest setting of 3. This initial test proved very promising for the likelihood that the headset mic would be able to provide a high level of sound quality for online voice communication. Movies. After finding the best settings for stereo sources, I was itching to test some true 5. Medusa headset handled multi- channel audio. I selected a number of movies with Dolby Digital 5. Dolby DTS 5. 1 audio that have a range of sounds from soft dialogue, to gunshots, front- to- rear "fly- by" projectile sounds, explosions, and environment acoustics. Here are the movies I chose for testing: Dolby Digital 5. Resident Evil: Apocalypse. Ong Bak. Predator. House of Flying Daggers. Dolby DTS 5. 1. War of the Worlds. The Transporter. Alien: Resurrection. The Descent Reversing the centre and sub channels makes the bass work properly, but also the source's centre channel is routed to the "sub" speakers and therefore is a little bit quiet and muffled. The sub speakers certain extend way above the quoted 1. Hz upper limit and seem to be almost full- range speakers themselves. Connecting the centre and sub channels normally meant the sub's bass was almost non- existent as it seems the Creative driver's bass redirection and crossover does not work as intended. Basically, one way round you get all the sound information but the dialogue is a bit quiet, and the other way round you get a clear centre channel but a significant portion of the bass is missing. The headset's centre and sub speakers are not at fault here, it is the Creative drivers not allowing the correct crossover behaviour. It seems the Creative X- Fi series has different subwoofer behaviour that acts normally when using certain settings, but for the Audigy 2 series, there is no perfect solution. Unfortunately I don't have access to an X- Fi soundcard to test the claims of others. Another solution I came across was to use the 3rd party k. X drivers, so I installed the newest k. X drivers and tried out a few recommended solutions. This proved fruitless so I tried the newest Creative drivers in case they solved any issues. No success whatsoever. This worried me a little, as I didn't think it boded all that well for 5. Vo. IP - Skype, MSN, Ventrilo, Teamspeak. Up next, testing the microphone for levels and also assessing clarity for people listening to me. The sound quality of the microphone was extremely good in all Voice- Over- IP applications and many of the people that I conversed with actually commented on how clear I sounded (compared to before when I used the Creative desktop microphone). One of the biggest differences is that the headset mic picked up my speech and very little background noise, whereas the Creative desktop mic picked up everything in the room including my main computer cooled by 1. The 4 metre cable length quickly proved itself to be very useful during conversations as I could easily get to just about anywhere in my room to find something and not have to take the headset off. Games. Unreal Tournament 2. Prey. Need For Speed: Carbon. Tomb Raider: Legend. Far. Cry. Half- Life 2. Counter- Strike: Source. The last part of the testing I expected to be the most fun, but also the most important, as I would be testing 5. Direct. Sound. 3D and Open. AL multi- channel games, while at the same time being able to converse over Vo.
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