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What drives these headphones is inside the very small sound controller, which in my opinion looks cheap compared to the headphones. I want a little wheel for the sound, instead of buttons and The led’s in the controller are too bright and they flash when you use the headphones. The sound controller has a total of 4 buttons, three on the front and one on the side to active or de-active the microphone. The mute button only works for the sound, it won’t mute the microphone input if turned on.

Inside you find a small PCB with a C-Media CM106L sound chip. This is a standard chip used in many USB audio devices. The sound quality is alright, but it needs some fine tuning with the mixer. I like to switch between settings for listening to music, or when im playing games.

“The CM106L is an 8-channel 16-bit DAC, 2-channel ADC (no bit depth is given on C-Media’s site, however), headphone buffering, and the USB transceiver.  Usually, a designer would include op-amps to drive the speakers.  In this case, the CM106L includes a buffered output for headphones, so it’s all integrated. -Guru3d.com-”

As these are USB headphones you can easily plug them in and they will automatically be recognized. It overrides the onboard sound card or pci sound card and as soon as you remove the USB cable it will switch back to your normal setup. The software let’s you tweak the equalizer settings, the bass / rumble features and Cyber Snipa included two demo’s to experience 5.1.

Now the way these headphones create the surround sound experience is all due to the way Cyber Snipa placed the speakers inside the cone. To create the surround sound effect, the center and channel speakers are angled and pointed away from your head.

Now there are a total of 8 speakers in both ear cones. You get two sub woofers, one in each ear cup. They produce a pretty good rumble. The sound however doesn’t sound as dark as with the 5H v2, I somehow miss the deepness and the punchy bass. The force feedback as Cyber Snipa likes to call it actually does make your head shake though.