ostebaronen.dk

The story begins with me reading a thread on Hifi4all.dk about Superlux HD660 and HD681. I had never heard of the brand before. Some of the users had discovered these headphones and started to praise them a lot, mostly because of the nice sound quality you get contra the price of the headphone. This thread links to another thead on rock grotto, which is about modding the Superlux HD681, which describes how good they play after some minor modifications. So this is where it caught me, why not buy these myself? They are after all only ~$30! After some shopping on Thomann I ended up buying a pair of these headphones and some AKG K240 velour pads, because the threads say the standard pads are not so comfortable and can get very sweaty.

Today I finally got them, first impressions of these headphones were that they feel very flimsy, the build quality is not very good compared to my previous Sennheiser HD555 or my current Beyerdynamic DT880. That did not scare me away. I plugged the headphones into my amp, and started to listen to them. First thing I noticed was the awesome bass, they are like having a subwoofer on your head! But the mids and highs are very good as well, but as many mentioned the highs can be a bit metallic, which is why I am in the process of breaking these headphones in. Pink noise for some hours or 10 to start with, and then some more until I hit about 100 hours or so. But I have to listen to them from time to time to see how the sound develops.

I am also planning on changing the cable on these headphones, because the factory cable is very very thin and flimsy. I might also try some of the other mods people have made on their headphones on Rock Grotto, such as the aluminium rings to replace the red ones, maybe also the filter to filter away those nasty metallic highs. But I am really looking forward to listening more to these headphones, probably the best buy I have done in a long time. Cheap ass headphones with great sound, what else do you want?

Also here is a quick picture for the interested.

A picture of the Superlux HD681's headphones with AKG k240 velour pads

As you might know Skype has been out for GNU/Linux for a very long time. It supports video and all kinds of stuff, which is very useful. It is all good, and works pretty well. Some might know the fancy feature that comes with Windows Vista per default. That is the possibility to turn the volume up and down for single applications, which is where Pulseaudio comes into the picture. This is a simmilar soundsystem for GNU/Linux that has existed for quite a while now, and ships with many of the big distributions.

Most applications work out of the box with Pulseaudio, some does not. Yes you are right, Skype does not work right out of the box with Pulseaudio, but with a quick configuration it works perfectly fine.

If you have not already a ~/.asoundrc file, make it. The following should go in this file:

pcm.!default {
type pulse
}
ctl.!default {
type pulse
}

pcm.pulse {
type pulse
}

ctl.pulse {
type pulse
}

First two sections make Pulseaudio the default audio system. The two last sections are making Skype able to select Pulseaudio. This might work for other applications also. When this is done and alsa and pulseaudio is restarted, start Skype and go to Options>Sound Devices
And change all the settings to pulse. Starting the Pulseaudio volume manager and trying to call a friend or making a testcall, shows that Skype appears in the list of applications using Pulseaudio.