One thing which can make or break a great evening of PC gaming is your headphones. If your significant other requires silence as you blast the night away and you have bland sound pumping into your ears from your cheap earbuds you might as well call it quits. Turtle Beach, a company known for making high quality audio gear for computers, thinks it may have the answer to your desires: the Ear Force AK-R8 headphones ($150).
The Turtle Beach Ear Force AK-R8 headphones are, according to Turtle Beach, designed to effectively eliminate the need for a separate sound card installed in your computer. These headphones have a multi-amplifier USB audio interface enhanced with digital signal processing. What does this mean exactly? Think of it as the headphones having their sound card in tow.
The USB audio interface, connected to your headphones through a USB cable, lets you use a variety of features with your Ear Force AK-R8. These include 5.1 digital surround sound, a programmable 10-band equalizer and ambience effects. With these options a listener can program the sound field they want from the headphones and save it as a preset. This is all done through a software interface.
Hardware wise the Turtle Beach Ear Force AK-R8 headphones come fully equipped even without the included USB audio interface. Each ear cup of these headphones sports discrete front, center, rear and subwoofer speakers in the casing. That’s eight speakers in total! These speakers receive no power from an external power source but instead draw upon the USB interface as the power keeper.
In addition to the discrete speakers the Ear Force AK-R8 offers up a cushy, soft velvet overlay for each ear cup. This is on top of a self-adjustable headband and removable/flexible microphone for talking smack with your online gaming buddies. You even get built-in stereo microphones as part of the package so you can hear what’s going on around you even as sounds of death echo through your head.
Accessories which come with the Ear Force AK-R8 include a USB cable, optical S/PDIF adapter for connecting to home theater equipment, an installation CD and a quick-start manual. The AK-R8 is compatible with Windows 2000, XP or Vista.
