-BirdiE-

Check out AKG K612 on Amazon UK. Can get it for just over $100 USD all-in, and is every bit as good as the DT 880 IMO (I own both, and I like K612 slightly better).

Lots of people using Beats for electronic music. Confirmed good.

I remember when I knew nothing about audio.... Go try plugging 103 dB/V headphones into the RCA outs of a DAC. Let me know how that goes for you.

Yeah... None of this is accurate...

HD 580 is going to be better than anything you'll get for $50-100

I don't get it... If you're willing to spend up to $100 to get a good budget set of headphones, why wouldn't you be willing to spend $60 to get your HD 580 working again?

Again, an investment is where you put in money in hopes to receive a gain in monetary value. This does not describe kickstarter.

I mean, if we want to play it that way technically everything you spend money or time on is an investment. Buying a banana is an investment. Going to the gym is an investment. But in normal financial terms, an investment is something that you purchase in hopes that it appreciates in monetary value. If you invest in a start-up company you take the risk that you lose money in hopes that the company, and thus your share in the company, appreciates in value and you net a return on your money. Purchasing a product, or even pre-ordering a product, would not be considered an investment in financial terms.

I don't think so, kickstarter is clearly a funding mechanism to gain money to finish developing and to release a product. but like any start up their is a high risk of failure. The people that pay should of know this, they should of been ok with the idea of losing the money and not getting anything out of it, other wise don't fund this kickstarter. If you really wanted to product then wait for it to release and buy it then, it you don't want the risk of losing money. The problem with looking at it as an investment is that when people invest in risky start ups, it's for a percentage ownership in the company. You're assuming risk, but you also have the potential for reward beyond your initial investment. Also, if the company later on realizes their business model is not feasible, all remaining assets are split by the investors. In this case it looks like they took the unspent money, took the assets, and ran. Pre-purchasing with only the potential for loss is not the same thing as investing. With that being said, I agree that people paying for things like this on Kickstarter are silly if they get upset. It's a broken platform. There are little to no controls to hold the start up accountable, so you should very much consider it lost money if you buy in.

What would you recommend for something like HD 650s without it being overkill? I'm not overly price sensitive, but I'd like to avoid spending unnecessarily.

So it wouldn't be your first pick, or it won't be powerful enough? I mean, I'm all for getting a new DAC and AMP if I need to, but is it really going to be worth spending $200 to switch when this one was already more expensive to begin with?

Don't have a set budget. What should I be looking for? I originally picked this one because I didn't have super high end headphones, and it supported me wiring my speakers to them, so I could use it for my non-headphone audio as well.

Hey Audiophiles, I've been itching to hop on the 6XX drop for a while now, and finally did this time around. Previously I had bought the TEAC AI-101d to go along with my current headphones, but now that I'm looking at the specs it's showing "100mW + 100mW (with 32 ohms load, 1kHz)" while the impedance of the 6XXs is 300 ohms. Do you think my DAC/AMP is going to be powerful enough to drive these well?

No point man. He's either a troll or a fanboy. Either way, reasoning won't help.

You know AMD cards have higher TDP than their Nvidia competitors, right? I'm not "for" either company, but specifically calling out Nvidia makes you look like a monster fanboy. Plus... Intel is no better than Nvidia. If anything, they're worse. Look at Intel when AMD wasn't competitive. like... 3% performance increase per generation, and stuck on 4 cores with their consumer chips for almost 10 years

If that's the case, I understand the frustration... As long as it's aimed at the developers for taking the "easy route" and not at Nvidia for simply making a tool available for people to use. Do you have any evidence to suggest it's not hard? (seriously asking). If I'm Nvidia, I can't think of a single reason I'd put forth any effort whatsoever to make it run well on AMD cards. Even if Nvidia were to artificially hinder AMD cards with their tools, that wouldn't be illegal. Now, if Nvidia was artificially hindering AMD cards in GameWorks and ALSO paying developers to use it, that could be anti-competitive and illegal... But I don't feel like going down that speculative rabbit hole right now. Plus, you never know... You'd expect paying developers to not develop their games for other platforms would be illegal... But it's apparently not.

I'm just not sure why it would make any sense for Nvidia to spend resources optimizing their software for their competition...

I don't know that that's true. The average developer using UE4, or Frostbite 2 is not going to alter the engine to render things differently... Unless they also created the engine... But then it would be built right into the engine, and not managed on a game-by-game basis. At least those are my suspicions. But then again, I'm not super familiar with game development so there's always the possibility that I have no idea what I'm talking about.

You're comparing the wrong things. Obviously by turning it off you get a reduction in graphical fidelity, but it's not a reduction compared to the developer not including game works at all. Let's use numerical values as representations... Option A) The developer doesn't incorporate GameWorks into their game. Their game has a graphics value of 8, and a performance value of 10. Option B) The developer incorporates GameWorks into their game. With GW turned on the graphics value is 10, but the performance for new Nvidia cards is 8, and AMD cards it's 5. By turning off GameWorks, it's the same as not incorporating it at all with a graphics value of 8, and a performance value of 10. By including game works you simply give people the OPTION to make the tradeoff. If they decide the tradeoff is not worth it, then they're no worse off than they would have been if GameWorks was not incorporated. It would be illogical to say that consumers are BETTER off with GameWorks not included.

I mean, ideally that would be great... I think we all realize that in every situation it would be ideal for companies to make their products better... But clearly right now Nvidia doesn't have the capability, or doesn't feel it would be worth the investment. As a consumer, it is your right to express your displeasure, but as a company it's their right to produce whatever product they want. Personally, I'd argue that you don't have much ground to stand on seeing as there's no other companies offering a better solution, and it's affecting you in no way... But that's merely my opinion, and you have just as much right to yours as I do to mine. Additionally, I was more addressing the people that were upset it was included at all because it didn't run well on their AMD card... and would rather see it cut out because they can't take advantage of it.

So you'd rather them just not include anything? Why? What difference does it make? If turning off GameWorks grants me the same performance and graphical fidelity that not including at all does, then the presence of GameWorks in a game has no affect on my experience... That's not ignoring a problem, that's identifying that it's not a problem. You seem to be implying that there's some bigger problem, but have yet to state what this problem is.

If turning off the GameWorks features solves the problems.... I'm just not sure why Nvidia adding in optional features that affect you in no way is a problem. Maybe I'm missing something, but you certainly haven't brought it up yet.

Does turning off GameWorks features not solve this?

I really don't understand what the issue with GameWorks is.... Does GameWorks run poorly on your hardware? Cool. Turn it off. Problem solved. I don't see why someone else having something you don't have is an issue if it doesn't affect your own experience in any way. For example: If they didn't include HairWorks, the game would still look exactly the same as if you just turned it off.

This Post: "Someone said something mildly rude on twitter and I don't like it!" OMG! WHO CARES?