Headphone Ramblings for Audiophiles (or people who just love enjoying music!)

I've always tried to have the best quality "toys" available given my budget, so I always do plenty of research regarding quality and bang-for-the-buck for any new "toy" I plan on buying.  This goes for anything from TV's to GPU's to Headphones.

Several years ago I had read many good reviews of Grado SR-80's, so I bought myself a pair and began to listen to them.  Since I had no other high-end headphones to compare them to, they were of course the best I had ever heard.  The only issue was that they lacked bass, were loud to other people in the room, and were very fatiguing to listen to (overly "bright" if you will).  I just figured I needed to learn to like them since they were supposedly the best for the money.

Fast-forward to last week; I decided it was finally time to try something new in the headphone department.  After much time spent reading even more reviews on multiple websites and forums, I decided on a pair of Ultrasone HFI-580's.  My researching also told me that they would sound even more amazing with a headphone amp, so I found one with a built-in high-quality DAC (Digital-to-Analog Converter) made by FiiO, called the E10; it plugs into a USB port and Windows automatically recognizes it as an audio device, and you can use it right away without any driver installation - nice!

Let me tell you, the step up in sound quality from the SR-80's, in my opinion of course, was HUGE.  These headphones with this amp sound AMAZING!  This is the perfect combination since the HFI-580's have EXCELLENT bass response, and the FiiO E10 has a built-in high-quality bass-boost switch that just "works" - it's something that you just have to hear to believe.

So in conclusion, if you're looking for a new set of high-quality headphones for enjoying the clarity of music, or playing games late at night (loudly inside your ears!) without waking people up, or any other uses, I can HIGHLY recommend these.  (Even more so if you have the budget for this Amplifier/DAC combo!)

Thanks for reading and have a great day!

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Other items I came across while looking for information:

V-Moda Crossfade LP2 - all metal construction (VERY durable) - these were out of my price range

Also, FiiO just came out with an even newer USB DAC after I purchased my E10, called the E17 - if your budget is flexible enough to cover this, I've read that this is one of the best DAC's you can get for the price, AND it has seperate adjustments for BASS, TREBLE, and GAIN!

Depth Hunter

While monitoring my GPU load in Depth Hunter, I enabled 3D Vision only to find the GPU load didn't go up a bit.  I thought something looked a bit "off" in 3D with this game - the three dimensional image is faked, a la Crysis 2 (uses the depth buffer to fake 3D)

Very disappointing when I have a GTX680, and the game uses cheap fake 3D.

Top Gun - Hard Lock

Short and sweet: This game is not for those who love fighter sims; it makes HAWX look like DCS A-10C (an advanced flight simulator)

 - At 1080p, it only pushes my 7970 to about 50% load, and there are no graphics options to increase other than resolution

 - At 1080p, the graphics are very pixellated, which leads me to believe that the game renders internally at 720p and upscales to the selected resolution

 - The game is incredibly and overly simplistic, for example to land on the carrier after your "mission" is over, you simply fly near it facing the runway and a cutscene appears with you landing

 - Basically dogfights consist of cheesy "Hard Locks" in which you and the enemy take turns alternating flying in front of and behind each other.  When you're in front of the enemy, you only have to do things like "Hold Right" to successfully get back behind him. "Perfect!" it says to you after you've held the right key.  When you're behind him, just keep the reticle centered on the enemy jet, and you get a perfect lock on, where you press CTRL to fire a missile and win.

In my opinion this game would be great for 4th and 5th graders.

Battlefield 3 AWC.DLL error / crash / won't start

To all having the AWC.DLL crash upon start: I've spent the past 48 hours ripping my hair out trying to fix it, and googling for answers and forum posts got me nowhere (for the first time ever)


Backstory:
Win7-64 was installed on a 60GB SSD (C:\ Drive)
Origin was installed on E:\ORIGIN\
Origin Game Directory was E:\GAMES\
Origin Tempory Installer directory was E:\TEMP\
Battlefield 3 worked fine.


I got a new Mushkin Chronos 120GB SSD and swapped it out for the A-DATA 60GB SSD, and installed a fresh copy of Win7-64 on the blank drive.  I then intalled a fresh copy of Origin on the new SSD, using all default directories (I figured why not - I have lots of extra space, might as well make origin and BF3 load lightning fast).

When I got ready to see how quickly levels loaded in BF3 from the new SSD, I was met with: "bf3.exe has stopped working" , awc.dll 0x00000005 (access violation)

"No big deal", I thought.  "I'll just google this real quick and figure out what's going on, tweak a file or setting and be on my way to pwning noobs with the jet's machine gun in no time."   Right.  I spent two days straight trying to figure out what the hell was happening, and the only thing I could find from googling was other people having the same problem (and actually many other crashes that kept them from playing the game too [hint: they were pissed])

After trying everything under the sun to get the game working again, I'll post the things I did in between BF3 installs that could have fixed the problem.

Uninstalled BF3 from control panel (which actually didn't work, had to delete the directory manually)
Uninstalled Origin from control panel
Download PunkBuster installer/uninstaller from EvenBalance, uninstall PunkBuster
Manually comb through the registry searching for, and deleting, the following:
"ea games"
"electronic arts"
"origin" <--- (make sure you only delete ACTUAL origin entries, not other windows registry keys that merely contain the word origin)
"battle~1"
"battlefield"

Yes, it took a while.  You click edit -> find, type it in and go, and then hit F3 to go on to the next one.

THEN, I searched both C and E drives for the following:

"ea games"
"electronic arts"
"origin"
"battle"

and deleted all the directories that it hides/stashes throughout the drive (especially things like \programdata and \users\you\appdata

Surprisingly, my registry and file searches came up empty for "punkbuster" or "evenbalance", that uninstaller must actually work; however feel free to add the terms "punk" and "evenbalance" to your searches above to be thorough.  Oh, I also deleted something from Chrome Browser's cache related to Battlelog - which came up through a file search for "battle"



NOW, you should have a cleaned computer and registry.

Also one thing I did at this time was updated my BIOS, the update note from Gigabyte stated "increased SSD compatibility."  I say this because *technically* (though unlikely) this could have been what fixed the problem.


FINALLY, I started over with Origin, trying to emulate the setup I had that was actually working two days ago: Installed origin to the E:\ drive and changed all the directories to be like I listed in the first paragraph above.  Upon origin's completion of downloading and installing BF3 (for like the fourth time in two days), I was ~*FINALLY*~ greeted with something other than an app crash!

If any of you out there are still having the AWC.DLL crash, hopefully either the cleaning or the installing to a different drive will work for you.  Note that I did try simply uninstalling and re-installing to a different drive to no avail, I had to uninstall and go through that manual cleaning process and THEN install to a different drive before it actually worked.

COME ON DICE / EA GAMES, HOW ABOUT A PROPER CRASH FIX (OR AT LEAST AN EXPLANATION?)

Postal 3

The Good: 
- It's Postal 3 !!
- Funny one-liners
- Good-old raunchy humour, just like Postal 2


The Bad:
- It's built using the older Source Engine
- There is no difficulty setting to choose
- You're stuck in third-person
- YOU CAN'T JUMP!




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I still haven't decided if this should be rated a "Buy" yet.

Holiday Gaming Selection

Which games deserve your holiday money?

After playing every major release this year, these are some of the ones I enjoyed the most and definitely deserve a buy:

Space Pirates and Zombies
Driver: San Fransicso  - (I know, I know, I couldn't believe it either!)
The Witcher 2
Portal 2
Skyrim
Serious Sam 3


Of those, only Skyrim and SS3 could be considered in time for "Holiday" games.  They are both excellent games and are highly deserving of your hard earned dollars, therefore I recommend whichever one suits your style of gaming (or both!)

Serious Sam 3 - Rating - EXCELLENT

I will update this with a review soon, but for now a few tips:

- To change the FOV, lower the console (tilde key) and type plr_fFOVOverride = 85
- The Pistol has unlimited ammo - the rest of your weapons do not!
- The Sledgehammer can kill nearly any enemy in only one hit - great way to save ammo!
- Press 'R' with the Sledgehammer equipped to do a 360-Spin-attack with it

Also note that this game is like Modern Warfare 3 in that it can render to a lower resolution rendertarget, then stretch it to your screen size for performance reasons.  So if the game's looking excessivly pixellated, check the "Performance" menu (not graphics!)


And finally, here's a few short videos of me playing the game, for you to get a feel for it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RP0hj8GswFM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JYXDgUUx3c&list=UUnHiZ-zWxMV_UOJ7GkDwoTg&index=2&feature=plcp

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Update: This is the game Duke Nukem *SHOULD HAVE* been.  This game rekindles the spirit of playing Doom and Doom II in the old days, it is some of the most fun I've had playing a first person shooter in years. Add to that the absolutely massive list of graphics options the developers give you to endlessly tweak (even including supersampling!), means you need to BUY THIS GAME NOW.