Epos Winds Down Former Sennheiser Gaming Headphone Business
www.anandtech.com

Technically the successor owner of the gaming brand.

Epos has announced that it will be exiting the gaming headphone business and will instead focus on enterprise communications products. The company’s gaming products…

  • Granixo
    2•9 months ago

    Yeah, when Vista came out it basically killed off sound cards as a mainstream product, both because of the new way the system interacted with the sound card and because of the big increase on CPU (and even GPU) requirements.

    But once Windows 8 came out in 2012, x64 finally became standard, and seems sound card manufacturers wanted to give one last hurrah by optimizing their drivers for Windows 8 (which makes them compatible with Win 10 & 11 almost by default).

    Now, the sound industry is still pretty much dead to anyone who isn’t an audiophile. But i’m happy to say that they are still products that can enhance your audio, production and gaming experience if you know how to use them. :)

    • Blake [he/him]
      3•9 months ago

      Thanks for sharing, and for putting me right, I appreciate it! I’m very glad that they’ve backtracked on that. While it’s not a huge amount of processing in most situations, I work as a programmer and I don’t love it when I compile code and my music sounds horrible for a few seconds as the CPU gets absolutely massacred by MSBuild.

      I have a DAC which is currently connected by USB - it does have SPDIF inputs as well, though. Do you happen to know if they make sound cards with USB output? Or would I need to use the SPDIF output on the card?

      I might still have an old sound card kicking around (Creative X-Fi Fatality or something) but I’m not sure it’ll have Windows 8+ compatible drivers, so I might have to get a new one.

      • Granixo
        2•9 months ago

        No prob, i’m glad to be helpful. 🙂✌️

        Now, i don’t know of any sound card that uses USB as an output, so yeah, SPDIF would be your only option.

        And yes, all X-Fi cards have Windows 8/10 official compatible drivers. They were the *top-tier sound solutions of their time after all. 🏆🎵

        *Except the X-Fi XtremeAudio, that thing is just a re-branded Audigy SE.