MaximumPC 2006 01

H

igh-end headphones are a blast. Pouring high-quality audio directly into

your aural canal is as addicting to an audiophile as mainlining black-tar

heroin is to a junkie. But the intimate proximity of headphone speakers to your

ears makes it difficult for them to present a true stereo image—the center of

the soundstage ends up inside your head, instead of in front of your face.

So if headphones have a hard time producing stereo, it must be down-

right impossible for them to create surround sound. You need a speaker

system with at least six discrete channels to deliver multichannel perfor-

mance, right? Well, if you present talented audio engineers with a challeng-

ing problem and a healthy R&D budget, they’ll eventually come up with a

solution. And the engineers at Sony, Pioneer, and other companies have

come up with headphones they claim can deliver true surround sound.

Skeptics that we are, we had to put these claims to the acid test. We

pitted the best surround-sound headphones we could find—Sony’s MDR-

DS8000 Digital Surround Headphone System—against Logitech’s top-of-

the-line Z-5500 Digital speaker system.

Speakers vs. Headphones

PRICE/PERFORMANCE RATIO

At the risk of putting the cart before the horse, we’ll tackle

this issue first because it will help us explain our testing methodology.

We used a Sound Blaster X-Fi and a collection of DVD-Audio discs, DVD

movies, and games to evaluate these products. But because neither

games nor DVD-Audio can deliver surround sound through the X-Fi’s digi-

tal-audio output, and Sony’s $800 headphone system doesn’t have ana-

log surround-sound inputs, we had to add Creative Labs’ $100 DTS-

Home Theater Connect to

the mix so we could encode

the analog signal before

sending it to the headphones.

Logitech’s $400 Z-

speakers, of course, have

both digital and six-channel

analog inputs. The Logitech

and the Sony devices are

both equipped with DTS

and Dolby Digital decoders.

WINNER: SPEAKERS

SURROUND-SOUND SPEAKERS:

Logitech Z-5500 Digital,

$400, http://www.logitech.com

head 2 headTWO TECHNOLOGIES ENTER, ONE TECHNOLOGY LEAVES

round 1

BY MICHAEL BROWN

16 MA XIMUMPC JANUARY 2006

SURROUND SOUND: