All posts by Tim Anderson

gadgets, gaming, mobile, reviews

Review: Turtle Beach z300 headset. Super flexible, shame about the sound

The Turtle Beach Z300 is a super flexible gaming headset, with wired and wireless connections, Dolby 7.1 virtual surround sound, and extra features like switchable dynamic range compression. It is primarily for PC gaming, but also works with Mac (no Dolby surround) and with any Bluetooth-compatible device – which means almost any smartphone or tablet. You can also use the wire to plug it into any device with a 3.5mm audio jack.

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In the box you get the headset, detachable microphone, USB cable, jack cable, USB transceiver, and some documents including a note about having to download the Dolby 7.1 drivers. I still recommend downloading the online manual, which is more detailed than anything in the box.

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A few more details on the three ways to connect:

Wireless via a USB transceiver. This is the preferred method for a PC. The USB transceiver is pre-paired and indicates via an LED whether or not the headset is connected.

Traditional wire. A jack cable is supplied which connects to the left earcup and has a standard four-way 3.5mm jack on the other end, suitable for a phone or tablet. In wired mode you still need to charge the headset and have it powered on.

Bluetooth. You can pair with up to two devices. The right earcup has Bluetooth volume controls, and a Bluetooth button for answering, rejecting and ending calls.

The actual headset seems sturdily made and features a fabric-covered headband and earpads. The material feels slightly coarse at first, and the earcups are slightly on the small side, but in practice I found the comfort reasonable.

The microphone is on a flexible boom and is detachable. You can also swing it up above the left earcup to get it out of the way.

You charge the Z300 via a mini USB port on the right earcup, which annoyingly is the old type, not the slightly smaller one now found on most phones and tablets. A cable is supplied, though it is too short to reach from the floor to your headset if you are wearing it, and in my case too short even to reach from the front panel of my PC. You might want to get a longer cable if you expect to charge while wearing. Play time is specified at 15 hours.

An annoyance: there is no indication of remaining charge.

How about the other controls? There are several:

Power on/off on the left earcup and easy to find by feel. The headset automatically powers off after 5 minutes of inactivity.

Master volume on left earcup.

Mic monitor volume on left earcup. This controls how much sound from the mic is fed back to your. It does not affect the volume heard on the other side.

Tone on left earcup: cycles through 4 “game modes”. These are Flat, Bass boost, Treble boost, and Bass and Treble boost. I generally used the Flat mode for this review.

Dynamic Range Compression on left earcup: raises the volume of quiet sounds. The effect seems minimal to me.

Bluetooth controls on right earcup: as mentioned above.

If you use the USB transceiver and a Windows PC you can insteall a Dolby 7.1 driver. Note: these are stereo headphones, but when used with this driver they support Dolby’s virtual surround system. You enable this by going into the Windows sound properties dialog (eg right-click the speaker icon and choose Playback Devices), then showing the properties dialog for the Turtle Beach speakers. A surround sound tab then lets you enable “Dolby Headphone”. You can also choose between two modes: Music or Movie.

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Enabling Dolby Headphone makes a substantial difference to the sound. It is distinctly louder, and the sound seems to fill out more. On games with true surround sound, the virtual sound should mean that you get spatial clues about the source of an explosion or footstep, for example, though you need to make sure the game is set to output in surround sound.

I tried this and reckon it works a bit. It is not as good as a headset I tried that really did have multiple speakers. My big gripe though is that if you enable Dolby Headphone, it messes up true stereo, for example on music. You no longer hear the mix as intended.

This would not matter too much if it were easy to switch Dolby Headphone on and off, but it is a hassle to go into Windows sound controls every time. I would like to see more effort go into usability.

How about the sound quality? Here is my second big gripe about this headset. The sound is not great, with anaemic bass and a nothing special in the mid-range or treble. For gaming it is not too bad, and I did find the audio atmospheric if you can live without much bass thunder, but for music they are not good enough.

The microphone quality is fine. I tried the headset with Dragon Dictate, just to check the quality, and got high accuracy of transcription which is a good sign.

In summary, the flexibility is exceptional, the build quality is fine, but the sound is lacking. Personally I would not use these as my main headset because I do both gaming and music listening; but if your main use is gaming they would be OK.

Price is around $170 or £170 (better value in the USA it seems).

audio, gadgets

Naim’s Statement: no compromise home audio

1 Comment

I was fortunate to hear Naim’s Statement amplifier, currently a prototype subject to final tuning before release in July, at the CES exhibition in Las Vegas.

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Statement is actually two amplifiers, the NAC S1 pre-amplifer and the NAP S1 mono power amplifiers. In the above picture you can see them standing together as three large vertical boxes, the slimmer pre-amp and the power amps on either side. Each amplifier is also divided horizontally, with the power supply below and the amplifier electronics above.

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I do not have confirmation of the price but believe it will be around £150,000 for a set.

My quick comment is this. The sound is huge and has the qualities Naim aficionados love: muscular, etched, authoritative. Naim is often considered to have a house sound dating back to its earliest electronics in the eighties, and the Statement continues that tradition.

I did not think the sound was flawless though. Rhythm and percussion was stunning, but whether it is the most natural sound I am not so sure. Can Statement do sweet and delicate? Bear in mind though that I only had a short listen and that some fine-tuning remains.

Naim says the sound is without compromise, and Statement will only appeal to those who are not only wealthy, but share that attitude, building their living space, or at least their music listening space, around the electronics, rather than having it blend into the furniture Bang & Olufsen style.

android, apple, audio

Bang & Olufsen Essence simplifies home audio – as long as you have the right smartphone

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Bang & Olufsen’s Tue Mantoni shows the new Essence controller

By how much can you simplify home audio? Long-established Danish company Bang & Olufsen reckons that the essentials are play, pause, volume, next and previous. The Essence controller is designed for wall mounting, or there is a tabletop version, and has just these functions. The goal is to make listening to music as easy as turning on the light. The company demonstrated the new system at the 2014 CES in Las Vegas.

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Other functions, such as choosing what music to play, are considered “Advanced.”

The brains of the system are in the controller box, which supports Apple AirPlay streaming, DLNA streaming, Spotify, QPlay, and internet radio. DLNA support means you could use it with other systems such as Logitech Media Server (formerly Squeezebox server) .

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The rear view shows the connections:

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You control the box via an app BeoMusic, which runs on Apple iOS or Google Android. I asked whether you could use a web browser if you happened not to have an iOS or Android device, and was told no. Windows Phone users, this is not for you. Box and remote together cost $995.

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Another part of B&O’s drive for simplicity is wireless speaker connections. The company is supporting a standard called WiSA which delivers up to 24/96 digital audio for up to 8 channels. Naturally this only works with powered speakers, so each one still needs a mains cable. You can use speakers that lack WiSA support by purchasing a receiver ($265 or £165) for each one.

The demo system we heard at CES included Beolab 18 active loudspeakers and a Beolab 19 subwoofer, both running wireless with WiSA. At $6,590 for the main pair and $3,395 for the subwoofer, this was not a cheap system.

I thought it looked lovely, but my face fell when the music started playing. The sound was decent but not the most natural I have heard, and I felt there was a trace of harshness at loud volume.

I doubt the sound quality is a limitation of WiSA: I visited the WiSA demonstration later on at CES and it sounded fine. I will add that the demonstration was brief and it is possible that in another room or with some tweaking the system would sound as good as it looks; but first impressions were disappointing.

audio

High end earbuds impress at CES 2014–especially Audiofly’s top model

I have heard a couple of high-end earbuds here at CES 2014 in Las Vegas. One was Shure’s SE 846. Great sound, but then you would expect that at $999.

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I was impressed by the extended bass and clarity of the 846’s and they should be on your shortlist if you are looking for the very best in earbuds. They sport four microdrivers including what Shure calls a “true subwoofer.” Frequency range 15Hz-20kHz.

On the other hand, when I heard Audiofly’s AF180 at a mere $549 I thought, hmm, I wonder if I could afford these?

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In other words, the AF180 struck me as exceptional rather than merely excellent. Part of the secret, I suspect, is their close fit into the ear. It is hard to explain, but you fit them with the cable dropping behind your head and over the ear, and the shaped housing fills more of your ear than the average earbud.

The AF180 includes four armature drivers in each earbud. Frequency range 15Hz-25kHz.

I listened briefly to both recent and older recordings. Even the Beach Boys California Girls, which I would not describe as a hi-fi recording, sounded as clear as I have heard it – and I mean clear, not artificially boosted in the treble.

I am researching hi-res audio here at CES, and these earbuds reminded me that for all the fuss about audio resolution and formats, the speaker is the source of most distortion in the audio chain.

Every ear is different and earbuds are a particularly personal area of audio. I head the AF180s the day after the SE 846 so was not able to compare them side by side or on the same musical material; perhaps if I did, I would change my preference.

Nevertheless, I like to post about products that particularly impress me, and the AF180 is one such.

gaming

Here comes Steam Machine: a quick look

At CES in Las Vegas I got a first look at Valve’s Steam Machine. This Brix Pro model comes from Gigabyte and will cost $499 for bare bones – no RAM or storage.

I was surprised by how small the thing is – quite cheap-looking in fact, especially when compared to something like Microsoft’s Xbox One which is large and sleek, and costs a similar amount (though smaller is good in most ways).

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Next to it you can see the controller, which gives you an idea of the scale.

Ports on the back are hdmi, DisplayPort (better quality), Ethernet and 2 more USB 3.0.

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and on the front, two USB and an audio socket (supports digital as well as analogue).

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Power is on top.

What counts though is the spec. Core i5 4570R (an i7 is also available), Intel Iris Pro 5200 graphics with 128MB ED RAM, wifi included. Max RAM is 16GB. It’s going to cost at least $100 –$150 extra to make it a working box.

Intel showed the Brix Pro driving a large display at 1080p.

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However, I was told that the little box has enough power to drive a 4K display as well as a second display at 1080p. In principle, you could have a Steam Machine with 3 4K displays for the perfect setup; Intel said that its Iris Pro 5200 is capable of this though not in this particular configuration.

Running Linux (SteamOS) and tapping into the huge Steam community and app store, Steam Machine is one to watch.

mobile

Nine months with Truphone: a solution to mobile roaming?

At last year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona a UK company called Truphone gave out SIMs to journalists for review. The claim is that rates are better for travellers than using roaming rates on typical contracts. The company also offers extras including the ability to assign multiple international numbers to a single SIM.

It is not my only SIM, but I have been trying it out with reasonable results. The best thing about it from my point of view is that calls home from the USA are a reasonable £0.10 per minute, which means I don’t need Skype and a decent wifi connection in order to call without worrying too much about the cost.

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Bizarrely, it is actually more expensive to call a UK number from within the UK, at £0.15 per minute, even though I have a UK number:

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It is more expensive for both calls and data in Spain, at at £0.21 per minute for calls and at £0.36 per MB for data:

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Data is a problem and I carelessly racked up a rather large bill in the US; £0.20 per MB does not sound too bad but a single MB does not go far with normal use.

Still, I can say in Truphone’s favour that signal quality is generally good and the rates better than most roaming deals. If you want to avoid the hassles of a local SIM in each country you visit Truphone is worth a look.

rants, software, windows

Something Microsoft has never fixed: why Windows is slow to start up

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One of the most common complaints I hear about Windows is that it is slow to start up. Everything is fine when a machine is new (especially if it is a clean install or purchased from a Microsoft store, and therefore free from foistware), but as time goes on it gets slower and slower. Even a fast PC with lots of RAM does not fix it. Slow boot is one of many factors behind the drift away from PCs to tablets, and to some extent Macs.

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As far as I can tell, the main reason PCs become slow to start is one that has been around since DOS days. Some may recall fussing about TSR – Terminate and Stay Resident – applications that would run at startup and stay in memory, possibly causing other applications to fail. Windows today is generally stable, but it is applications that run at startup that cause your PC to start slowly, as well as having some impact on performance later.

I install lots of software for testing so I suffer from this myself. This morning I took a look at what is slowing down my desktop PC. You can view them easily in Windows 8, in Task Manager – Startup tab. A few of the culprits:

  • Adobe: too much stuff, including Service Manager for Creative Suite, Creative Cloud connection, Acrobat utilities
  • Intel Desktop utilities – monitors motherboard sensors
  • Intel Rapid Storage Technology – monitors on-board RAID
  • Sync applications including SkyDrive, Dropbox, SkyDrive Pro (Groove.exe)
  • Seagate Desktop, manage your Seagate NAS (network attached storage)
  • Google stuff: Google Music Manager, Google update, some Chrome updater
  • Plantronics headset updater
  • Realtek HD Audio Manager
  • Fitbit Connect client
  • SpotifyWebHelper
  • Microsoft Zune auto-launcher
  • Microsoft Lync, famously slow to start up and connect
  • Roccat Gaming mouse settings manager
  • Flexera “Common software manager” (InstallShield updater)

Many of these applications run in order to install a notification app – these are the things that run at bottom right, in the notification area of the taskbar. Some apps install their own schedulers, like the Seagate app which lets you schedule backup tasks. Some apps are there simply to check for updates and inform you of new versions.

You can speed up Windows startup by going through case by case and disabling startup items that you do not need. Here is a useful guide. It is an unsatisfactory business though. Users have no easy way to judge whether or not a specific app is doing an important or useful task. You might break something. When you next update the application, the startup app may reappear. It is a mess.

Microsoft should have addressed this problem aggressively, years ago. It did put great effort into making Windows boot faster, but never focussed on the harder task of bringing third-parties into line. A few points:

  • If Windows had a proper notification service, many of these apps would not need to exist. In Windows 8, it does, but that is little help since most applications need to support Windows 7 and even in many cases Windows XP.
  • The notification area should be reserved for high priority applications that need to make users aware of their status at all times. The network connection icon is a good case. Printer ink levels are a bad case, aside from reminding us of the iniquity of printer vendors selling tiny ink cartridges at profiteering prices. In all cases it should be easy to stop the notification app from running via a right-click preference. The Windows 7 idea of hiding the notification icons is counter-productive: it disguises the problem but does not fix it, therefore making it worse. I always set Windows to show all notifications.
  • Many tasks should be done on application startup, not on Windows startup. Then it is under the user’s control, and if the user never or rarely runs the application, no resources are grabbed. Why do I need to know about an update, if I am not running the application? Have the application check for updates each time it runs instead.
  • It is misguided to run a process on start-up in order to speed up the first launch of the application. It may not be needed.
  • If a background process is needed, such as for synchronisation services, why not use a Windows Service, which is designed for this?
  • Windows has a scheduler built in. It works. Why write your own?

Of course it is too late now for desktop Windows. Microsoft did rethink the matter for the “Metro” personality in Windows 8, which is one reason why Windows RT is such a pleasure to use. Apple does not allow apps to run on startup in iOS, though you can have apps respond to push notifications, and that strikes me as the best approach.

Update: I should mention a feature of Windows 8 called Fast Boot (I was reminded of this by a commenter – thanks Danny). Fast Boot does a hybrid shutdown and hibernation:

Essentially a Windows 8 shutdown consists of logging off all users and then hibernating.

This is almost another subject, though relevant. Microsoft has for years sought to address the problem of slow boot by designing Windows never to switch off. There are two basic approaches:

Sleep: the computer is still on, applications are in memory, but in a low power state with screen and hard drives off.

Hibernation: the computer writes the contents of its memory to disk storage, then powers off. On startup, it reads back the memory and resumes.

My own experience is that Sleep does not work reliably long-term. It sometimes works, but sooner or later it will fail to resume and you may lose data. Another issue on portables is that the “low-power state” is not as low power as it should be, and your battery drains. These factors have persuaded me to shut down rather than sleep.

My experience of hibernation is better, though not perfect. It usually works, but occasionally fails and again you lose data.

Fast boot is a clever solution that works for some, but it is a workaround that does not address the real issue which I have outlined above: third-party and Microsoft applications that insist on automatic start-up.

laptops, rants, windows

Toshiba ships DVD media with laptop without DVD drive

One day you will be able to buy a Windows device and have a smooth and delightful experience getting started.

To be fair, something like a Surface tablet can give offer a reasonable experience if you are lucky.

Not so a Toshiba Portege Z930 ultrabook – at least, not if you buy one with Windows 7 pre-installed, and want to run Windows 8, as a contact of mine has just done.

Why would you not buy one with Windows 8 pre-installed instead? With hindsight, that is what I would recommend; but since it says on the box, “This system is pre-installed with Windows 7 Pro software and also comes with a license and media for Windows 8 Pro software,” he did not think it much mattered.

The problem: The Z930 has no optical drive, but Windows 8 is supplied in the form of two recovery DVDs.

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I thought that was pretty silly, but luckily I know all the tricks about creating a bootable USB drive from a DVD. I even spotted the note in the box that instructs you to go into the BIOS and change it from CSM Boot to UEFI Boot.

No go. It would not boot from the USB drive in UEFI mode, and in CSM mode (which is also meant to work for Windows 8, with a few limitations) it boots, starts a Toshiba recovery wizard, and then bombs out.

I spoke to support. The first thing they told me, unprompted, was to make Windows 7 recovery disks, since not everyone likes Windows 8.

Next, the support guy was surprised that a model without a DVD drive ships with DVDs. Had the machine been tampered with? Then he looked it up, and admitted that they are all like that.

After a little more investigation, he said there is no way it will work from a bootable USB drive, because it is coded to look for the DVD. The only way is to buy an external DVD drive and attach it via USB.

The behaviour began to make sense to me. The scripts must be hard-coded to look on the optical drive for the files. I’d guess you can fix it by modifying the scripts if you know where to look, but life is too short and I went out and bought a DVD drive.

Smooth after that? Not brilliant. Recover Windows 8, go to Store for Windows 8.1, remember that you have to apply updates before it appears, apply 80 Windows updates, remove McAfee trialware and a few other unwanted applications, back to Store, do large Windows 8.1 download, and done.

In an era where usability is king, it is remarkable that Toshiba thinks that shipping DVDs with a computer that cannot read them is a smart thing to do. That said, I have a few more observations.

  • If you got a product key for Windows 8 and could download the media from Microsoft, that would work. But OEM Windows 8 is now pre-pidded so you don’t get a key.
  • If Microsoft were not still making so much money from businesses paying for Windows licenses, it could give Windows away and offer users a more Apple-like upgrade experience.
  • If Microsoft had not come out with a Windows upgrade which many of its customers do not like, companies like Toshiba would not be selling so many laptops with Windows 7 pre-installed.

As for the Z930, it is a lovely light, fast laptop if you do not need touch. But when will Windows OEMs, and to some extent Microsoft itself, learn the importance of out-of-the-box user experience?