Headphone preamp on soundcard, Required or not? Options

[Tripwire]

I got my Aureon 7.1 today, and it actually has a dedicated headphone preamp on the PCB (my old Audigy apparenly didnt). Now, when I set the master volume to 50%, I got my desired volume on the headphone, and seems to sound OK. When I turn on the preamp, it almost blows my head and the headphones at 50%. I need to turn the volume down to 10% when using the preamp to get the same perceptual volume as without.

Now the thing is, do I really NEED to use the preamp on headphones? Does it affect the quality using it or not?

Thanks.

[indybrett]

Am having those exact same problems with my Terratec SixPack as well.  Static and very faint noises when moving things in the Windows (XP) GUI.  Already wrote to the Terratec Support about it a few days ago.  Didn't think it woud have to do with the OS though.  Already tried moving the card to different PCI slots and that did not help either.

I already wish I had bought the M-Audio...


Win2000 does not completely eliminate the problem, but it does seem to be a lot better than XP. I'll need to stress test it for a week.

Even so, I don't plan on running Win2K forever.

I had tried changing slots, changing IRQ's, changing drivers, etc.

Audiotrak suggested I change the latency. That didn't help. I suspect that there is a hardware problem here that can not be fixed with a driver.

I'll let you know how it works after a week with Win2K. One other thing to note is that my motherboard has a VIA chipset. Not sure if that matters.

Edit: spelling

This post has been edited by indybrett: Jun 19 2003, 01:38