[Sharpy86]

Hi all,

I am very sorry if something like this has been asked 1000 times before!
I bought a set of Sennheiser HD-595s brand new of ebay for my PC. First time out the box, and they sounded brilliant to me!!

However, I found my old 'round the neck' headphones - Sennheiser PMX60, and decided to do a comparison test between the two.

Honestly....I could not tell any difference at all! I re-riped my CD's to 256kbs - I also couldn't tell the difference between the two, 128 and 256. I am using onboard sound, but I thought I would have expected to hear at least some difference?

I'm running on a ASUS P5Q SE/R motherboard, I have tried changing the sound output to the highest studio settings etc but to no avail.

I'm playing through iTunes btw.

I am planning on getting a sound card as I like to play FPS games, and since i'm running vista, MS have screwed with all the sound settings. I was looking at a ASUS D2X. But would this make that much difference??

The headphones don't sound bad, they just don't seem to have any advantage over my old cheapo ones. Could it just be I have terrible ears!? Like my taste buds...non existant! Was that chicken or beef?

Thanks in advance!

Matt

[lever.mark]

you need to encode at higher than 256 i would suggest. Try playing a cd through itunes without compressing it. 256 is still fairly compressed.

I have the asus xonar d2 (pci version rather than pci-e which is the D2x i think) and it does make a difference. A high quality source played through it sounds much better.