Since buying C an Xbox for her birthday, I’ve spent a lot more time in the computer room playing on my Xbox Elite than playing in the front room on limited edition Halo Reach Xbox, on the 52″ TV, connected to the TrueHD 7.1 Amp.
To be honest, I actually prefer it, as we’re being a more sociable with each other. In the past, I would normally spend a good couple of hour playing on the Xbox downstairs, and C would lose hours on a “Dinner Dash type” time management game.
In the computer room we both have an LG LED 23″ FullHD Monitor/TV which we have the Xboxs connected to, which we then use as a 2nd monitor. The LED TV’s are great and give a great picture, however the sound quality is only average at best. I’ve spend the last week or so with a pair of £10 Sony headphones on, which does give a lot better sound, but….I do miss the surround sound.
Now we have the history out of the way, you now know why I’ve been out and bought this headset. As I mentioned above, I tend to spend more time in the computer room being “sociable”, but miss the surround sound. I knew there were headsets out there that could product a surround sound experience, as this type of stereo expander has been mainstream for quite a while.
I did look as some headphone which actually had multiple speakers in each earphone which would give an actual surround sound, however these are advertised as being able to give a true 7.1 using only a stereo headset….obviously I was intrigued and bought them.
The DPX21 is essentially a bundle. It’s the Ear Force PX21 headet, with the Ear Force DSS digital processor. The processor itself has an optical input, which then passed 7.1 / 5.1 to the headset giving you the 7.1 surround sound experience.
Now to be honest, I was a little dubious, as everything in my head suggests, that stereo headphones and and will only produce a stereo sound ….surly ?…….I wrong was I !!! These things are AMAZING !!!
Once I’d got everything wired up (which was slightly messy to be honest), I fired up Red Dead Redemption on the Xbox and was totally blown away the the ambiance. I then fired off a couple of shots, and just sat there with the biggest smile on my face. I have to say, that my expensive amp and 7.1 speaker system in the front room has been equalled if not beaten by this £100 headset !
I then plugged these into the PS3 and put on the Black Hawk Down bluray (my Bluray of choice when testing an audio system), and again… AMAZING !
As you can probably tell from the above, the headset is universal, it works on the PS3, Xbox and Mac/PC (assuming you have an optical port)
The headset itself is very comfy, it is a little weighty, but the head strap is adjustable enough to take the weight.
All in all, this is an amazing headset, and suggest to anybody who is playing games on a Xbox, PS3 or even PC/Mac in 2 channels due to not having room to place the speakers….and have a £100 spare, go buy theses, they are amazing !
I found these at Amazon for about £110, however with shopping around I found them at just over £90 at shopto.net with free shipping.
As always, unboxing photos below, as well as the official blurb from Turtle Beach describing how these work.
As some of you may have seen on Facebook and Twitter that I’ve been messing around with a number of Star Wars action figures. These in particular and a couple of stormtroopers, and an R2D2 unit (this is what happens when a 35 year old goes shopping after a couple of beers).
I’ve also been after an opportunity to put the iPhone 4′s camera to work. All the images below are shot with the iPhone 4′s 5 megapixel camera.
Now I wish I could take credit for the idea, however there are a lot smarter people on the internet, with a lot better camera’s than me, just google StormTroopers day off.
If you are anything like me (and god help you if you are ), and use the internet as a PVR, then this software will be a god send to you.
I’ve just recently ordered a Mac Mini to replace my last remaining Windows machine, and thought I’d better check if I could still do what I do now.
Currently my Dell machine, sits in the corner, and is used as my media server, my iTunes server and my torrent machine. Currently I have uTorrent installed, which downloads each episode using the RSS Feed option. Each of the RSS feeds points to a particular RSS feed for my favourite TV program from eztv, and once a new episode is detected, it’s downloaded.
Once the episodes are downloaded, these get copied to a shared location on my NAS Box, which I can then stream to my PS3′s or Xbox using PS3 Media Server.
I did a little googling last night, and even though there is a Mac version of uTorrent, it’s still in beta, and missing a lot of the functions that the Windows version has, eg the RSS downloader.
After a little more googling, I found a tidy little piece of freeware software called ted (Television Episode Downloader). Essentially it has a list of all the TV episodes that you can select from, and when a new episode appears, it will download the torrent file, and open this with your default torrent client.
Ok, this that fixes the missing functionality of uTorrent, however the software is a lot smarter that the RSS Downloader function in uTorrent, as once you’ve added your favourite shows, you can choose to start from the next available episode, the previous episode, or even download every episode. You then have the option to select “HD Only”, which will only download episodes with the tag of HD or 720.
The interface will also show you the name of the next episode, and when it’s going to be aired.
The good thing about this software is that is available free of charge on Mac, Windows and Linux, and only requires that you have a torrent client installed (I highly recommend uTorrent, Mac and Windows clients available).
Now some people may have a problem with downloading episodes from the internet, I however don’t mind, as I tend to buy the boxsets once they are available. Also this is little different to using BBC iPlayer, or Sky Anytime.
