Lauen

I don't have a defined budget but as long as it's not in the hundreds of dollars range we could do it. If there's an option to just BUY a VPN service that lets me configure it to send traffic through the office internet without having to install a Linux server, that'd be great. Otherwise, WireGuard seems to be free aside from the labor of setting it up.

My company is an independent contractor working with the municipalities in our area. There's no "call IT" as we're just 5 dudes who know how to solder and connect wires better than the janitors. I have complete freedom in HOW I set it up, really. There's no IT department over me. The router is a Zyxel 8702 according to the config page. the config page has nothing about VPNs on it. Just a built in firewall in the Zyxel 8702 router and whatever Windows 10 calls a firewall. I'm hoping for something so simple on the client end it'll be like PIA / Nord, just click "on" and it's on. There's no IT department over me. We're independent and have to find solutions on our own. If I have to, I will sit down and set up a Linux based server, I just wanna know if I absolutely have to or not. and if I have to, how do I do it?

Hi guys, I looked through a few pages of threads but couldn't find a fit for my problem. My job requires me to be available to log in to certain sites at almost all times, regardless of where I am. These sites are management sites for alarm systems in municipal buildings. Some of these sites are starting to get serious about security and as such are now whitelisting IPs and trying to keep that list as short as possible. My office is whitelisted, along with my higher ups office and the municipal building for whatever site it is. I now need a way to route internet traffic through the internet at my workplace (VPN?) which only my colleagues and I will have access to so we don't have to drive to the office to do small tasks if we are at another building. It can be a 4 hour drive to get back to the office. At the office we only have a few laptops for work and some real old desktops of questionable performance, and as you might suspect with municipal work, we don't have much of a budget either. I've heard of OpenVPN and WireGuard but those seem to require me to set up a Linux server, and I have minimal experience with that. We've tried just using TeamViewer but with old copper based internet that is too far from the nearest node to get past 20/2 megabit, TeamViewer was very slow and unresponsive, plus I have 3 other colleagues that will need access and TeamViewer's licenses are quite expensive. If I have to use OpenVPN or WireGuard, so be it. But I can't quite make sense of the setup so it would be great if anyone could clarify it for me. TL;DR: I need to reroute traffic from a few laptops through slow office internet, preferrably cheaply and simply.

From personal experience, there is a pretty big difference if you just find the right pair for your ears. Shure SRH440's are 99 bucks and to my ears sound a lot better than HyperX Clouds. the Clouds aren't bad, it's just that the SRH440s are better for merely 10 more bucks, with much clearer overall sound, especially in the bass department, and is a little more balanced. some prefer lots of bass and the SRH440's are not for those kinds of people, but then you can instead grab a pair of Audio Technica ATH-M40X. they sound very similar to M50X but cost less. a good deal of bass, sparkly highs and alright mids. too much bass and highs for me though.

Is this all the time or just in games? It sounds an awful lot like if I don't plug my source cable for my amplifier all the way in, or touch the metal connectors to something else that is metal, like the legs on my desk. make sure the connector is plugged all the way in, and try unplugging and replugging it. if your case has front audio as well as rear audio, try both. I'm thinking grounding issue.

As stated (by rice guru too) the DT990 has more bass and I forgot to mention the highs. going from the typical Sennheiser kind of sound to Beyerdynamics can be a big change. I'm not sure if your amp can push the headphones loud enough but I think they can. If you wanna be safe, you can just stick with the HD598's. I can't guarantee you'll enjoy the bass and brightness of the DT990s.

depends on what kind of sound you want. Sennheiser 598's are sorta neutral, slightly dark sounding headphones. they're very easy to listen to and don't fatigue your ears with lots of bass or sharp highs. M50X (or the old standard M50 and M50S which are VERY close) are the other way around, marketed as a neutral monitoring headphone but are a little on the bass heavy side, and had pretty sharp highs that (to me at least) hurt after a little while. they were also not particularly comfortable (compared to Sennheiser HD 5-whatever series and Shure SRH440/840) due to small earcups that almost made it an on-ear design for me and the earpads turned to stone after 2 months, though some claim this was resolved on the X series. If you enjoyed the Sennheiser type of sound but want closed headphones instead, go for the 598 CS (closed version) or the 569 which will sound almost the same but with some passive noise attenuation. If you want more bass, you're more than welcome to try the M50X but I'd suggest Shure SRH840 (or 440 with 840 pads, cheaper and sounds almost the same), Beyerdynamic DT770, maybe even the Sennheiser HD280 or 380 or the new replacement for both of them, HD 300 Pro. Open headphone again? you already know how the 598 sounds. 599 is supposedly a little better. then there's the 600 and 650 if your budget allows for it. other brands? Philips Fidelio X2 maybe? More bass = Beyerdynamic DT990 or 880. I'm just throwing suggestions at this point and have forgotten about the budget. in the end it's up to you, if you were satisfied with the 598's, just get another pair. they are good.

I have soldered on a new cable once or twice, the hard part is figuring out which cable does what. there's a ground, left and right channel (in the main cable before the splitter thing) and if there's a mic, a cable for that too. the individual cables are usually really really thin and covered with some stuff I think is for insulation maybe. as long as you're not swapping to a new cable, you can essentially just strip back some of the rubber around the cable to expose the wires inside, if they are covered with color coded insulating stuff you can burn it off with a lighter, but be gentle. then just match the cables by color, solder them together, use heatshrink or electrical tape and to cover the wires individually and then as a complete package, and then you should be good. did this to swap a cable to a new one once, and another time I had a phone without a headphone jack (good old HTC Touch Cruise with Windows Mobile 6.0 and just a USB Mini B port). came with a set of awful earbuds, I cut off the cable right after the microphone and soldered on cables for a Koss Porta Pro and used that for half a year until I could afford a better phone. do this at your own risk however, I do not guarantee it'll work, especially if you do not have any experience soldering.

I unfortunately don't have personal experience with the shotgun mics but I HAVE experience first hand the difference bringing the mic real close does. you can get really bad dynamic mics that plug right into your 3.5mm mic input that sound like a wet fart in a too small bong for very cheap. I've heard tons of screaming / growling tutorials on youtube that use this kind of mic and it sounds exactly like the russians I meet in northeast EU matchmaking in CS:GO. truly incredible microphones that somehow literally only sound like breaking glass on top of an empty steel container before you even start speaking edit: my post turned out to not make any sense at all after I posted it but eh, I'm leaving it as is

theoretically a mono RCA to 3.5mm jack should work, but I can't find any info from Logitech on which input on the sub is for center + sub. you could get one of those cables, plug from sub preamp output and then just try all 3 inputs on the sub one after another until you get something. I can't guarantee you WILL get something because prepackaged cheap surround systems don't always work well in a DIY setting. you can probably get one of those cables I linked for like 5 bucks so it won't be a too expensive way to test it out. personally I'd get a standalone sub, for example this bestseller on amazon (maybe not a great one but certainly pretty nice value) or from a decent brand with a very simple setup with just power, volume, and a single mono RCA connector.

I remember a guy on some forum (it's been 5 years since I read the thread and I can't find it again) who had a 5.1 surround setup and used a shotgun mic aimed directly at his face from on top of his monitor and claimed his friends could not hear him play BF3 or 4 or which ever was the one he played. but that's expensive, while that neweer arm is not.

why are looks even something you consider? won't you just be sitting in your room playing video games anyway? you won't be looking in a mirror all day.

A guy I work with also has Beyer DT770's and bought the SteelSeries Arctis Pro because he also wanted something wireless. He claims he can't hear the difference between the two. but this is also the man who has not once complained about the sound quality in the work car, which is pretty trash. I'd also suggest the Sennheisers, heard a lot of good about all the new Sennheiser gaming stuff.

do the videos and music get loud enough for you? if yes, there's no real problem here. if no: is the volume slider on youtube maxed? also you lowered the potential quality of your listening experience by setting it to 16 bit 32 khz. I'm running 24 bit 48 khz and it's fine to me. and just because I was curious, I put on a song in my media player and on youtube music to compare levels and my downloaded file (bought off amazon) was much louder and 100%'d my volume "green bar" while the Youtube version only went to 50-60%. I think it's just YouTube my man.

bringing the blue snowball closer to your face and further from your keyboard will help a lot. I got a 12 dollar neweer stand for my snowball and although you CAN hear my keyboard it really isn't all that bad unless you slam your keys with the force of 1000 suns. I don't however have one of those clicky switches like MX Blue or anything of that sort, I have linear switches. For a different kind of fix that requires more money, a directional mic or at least dynamic mic will help. best case scenario will be a shotgun mic, some of the better examples like RØDE NTG series can be 200 dollars pretty quickly and then you'll also need an interface for it, which will probably start at like 50 bucks. ModMic is another option, getting the mic real close and you can turn down the gain so it'll pick up less keyboard in relation to mouth noises. 50 bucks starting price and you just plug it in and glue a little magnet to your headphones. pretty easy.

Why not go for a slightly less janky setup and get a simple USB soundcard that you use for either the headphones or the speakers and just switch the sound output? If your post signature is up to date and you're still using Windows 7, there's a program called SoundSwitch. If you have upgraded to Windows 10 you can just click the audio icon and switch it there. By all means, using a splitter works. I just think it'd be a nicer solution overall to do what I suggested. You do you.

Honestly this sounds like a troll post but I'm bored. "Gaming" headSETS aren't inherently better for gaming. The only reason they're gaming headSETS is that they come with a mic attached so you can use voice comms. Some gaming headsets advertise that you can hear footsteps easier and have virtual surround and stuff like that. I've tried a few virtual surround setups (Logitech G35, some Creative software I can't remember), various built-in game setups, and the one that came with my ASUS Xonar soundcard way back in 2013ish. I also got to try a Razer Tiamat 7.1 with actual physical surround in a headset. It was pretty bad. All they do is add reverb so things sound like you're drunk, and very often boost the bass. The worst was trying to listen to music with it, as all the punchy attack from drums and palm muted high gain guitars just sorta disappeared. Vocals often lost their center stage place and got sorta ethereal, as if a divine being would speak inside your head. The best you can do for yourself is to get a good pair of open headphoned. Open headphones will give you a wide soundstage which will help you pinpoint where footsteps and gunshots are in games, and they'll for the most part sound fairly natural. If you want bass, Beyerdynamic DT990. If you want a more neutral sound, Sennheiser HD600/650, or if you can't afford those you can step down to Sennheiser HD518/558/559/599/598, whichever of those fit your budget. They sound very similar, a fairly neutral response but veeeery slightly "veiled" meaning some of the highs are a little subdued. Not my personal choice but they're very easy to listen to. If you need sound isolation / passive attenuation, closed headphones like the Sennheiser HD569 is pretty decent and sounds a lot like its brethren. Beyerdynamic DT770 has more bass and a decently wide soundstage for a closed headphone. I can also recommend the Shure SRH440 / 840. If you get the 440 I recommend you get the pads for the 840s for better comfort, the pads are called HPAEC840. If you want even more bass you could even go for an Audio-Technica ATH-M40X (M50X is overpriced when the M40X sounds almost exactly the same). I'm sure there are other headphones in the category that are good but I haven't been paying attention to anything for 5 years. If you need a mic for voice comms, a Blue Snowball is very simple and sounds pretty good if you get it close to your mouth.

They really don't. I used to work customer service for them, but through a customer service company operating on a contract with Apple, in a foreign country. It was 1 out of 3 locations, all in different countries and companies, and with different trainers. It WAS a norwegian-speaking support line, but they only had phone lines. no emails, no chat. training was done in english with 2 trainers that had worked on english and italian lines, and of course the cultures are very different so some of the things we were told to say were sorta weird. The office hosted multiple language teams, including french, dutch, norwegian, danish, swedish and finnish. The nordics were lumped together on the same phone system with no distinction between the languages. Any day I worked for the first 5 months, I'd just hear the phone ring and had to just check the country code to see what language I'd get. Finnish was the hardest because of the language differences and the fact that quite a lot of finns are not exactly great at english. when it was solved, we learned that there was a "skills" page, where they differentiated your language skills and skills in sales or aftersales. Prior to the language fix, we were all set to 10/10 skill in all the nordic languages (excluding the french and dutch lines of course as they were alright) and after the fix I was set to 10/10 norwegian, 5 in swedish and danish, and a 2 in finnish I think. And then eventually the entire contract I was on was sacked, with the excuse being "Apple are looking to unite the best workers under one roof". I was friends with some of the workers in the other companies and they didn't even know my team got sacked, and had not heard anything about the unification of workers and locations. AFAIK it still hasn't happened they way we were informed. All in all, not great. coworkers were fantastic people though.

And that right there is why I stopped using Spotify, resorted to less honest solutions for a while, and buy albums when I can afford it. Spotify has either never had, or has removed, almost half of the collection of 2 of my favorite bands, Judas Priest and Annihilator. Some other bands I listen to, they might have ALL the releases a band has ever done, including all the compilations (waste of space imo) and live albums. I buy from Google Music nowadays as Amazon has shut out customers from countries Amazon don't operate in, or at least for me in Norway, iTunes is awful IMO and there are no local solutions for buying MP3 files, and buying actual CD's here is twice as expensive as Google Music.

If it doesn't get loud enough for you, you don't need an amp. if there's audible artifacting / pops / hissing, you need a new dac and maybe an amp (hissing could be a high noise floor) if you just want bass, most music programs come with EQ settings, or you can get a stereo amplifier as those generally have some tone control knobs. a used stereo amp from like.. early 90s can be had for as low as 20 bucks, at least that's what my amp cost me.

I recommend you right click the Realtek audio, hit properties, check "disable all enhancements" in the enhancements / advanced tab. I may be slightly off with my specifics but I hope you get the idea.

Output impedance is only crucial when it comes to being lower than 1/8 of the impedance of the speakers in whatever you are using. a higher output impedance will lead to distortion. The lowest possible output impedance is the best, what you need is actual power (the actual ampere) for sufficient volume. I used to have an ASUS D2X card which by my math had 10 ohm output impedance, and when I plugged my JBL J33i IEMs into it (this was in late 2013) it broke the IEMs. Low output impedance is the way to go. DACs in most motherboards in the last 10 years are actually pretty good, they mostly produce sound detailed enough for the average human to not hear the difference between it and higher end ones. Schiit Fulla (combo DAC + amp unit) or Schiit Magni (just amp) should be sufficient for your needs.

Judging by the pictures it'll have the HERO sensor Logitech has been putting in their newest mice. Judging by the pictures it'll also be a "logicool" mouse.

Well, this is gonna sound incredibly stupid but I just found a fix for this, sort of, and 100% by accident. When I turn off my 2nd monitor, in the Nvidia control panel, instead of defaulting to the PC Resolution group of resolutions, at 1920x1080, it instead goes to Ultra HD 1080p which stops at 120hz. That is what it defaults to. However, scroll down in that list and it gives me the usual resolution and refresh rate. I feel very stupid right now. But yet again, I do not understand why this would even be a thing.

Yes, but I can't go further than 120hz. Sure, the difference between 120 and 144 isn't a whole lot in my experience but I would like to get the full experience.