Digital Trends

Ezonics ESound 5.1 February 25th, 2004 | by Jeff Fila

Pass The Popcorn

Next, we tested the ESound headphones while watching, and listening intently to, The Matrix: Revolutions, Saving Private Ryan, and several other films with a lot of action and Dolby Digital sound.

The Normandy scene in Saving Private Ryan was almost as intense watching it on our 15.4” laptop screen with the ESound headphones as it was in the theater. The sound of bullets whizzed by your head from every direction and explosions were thunderous and deep. Similar experiences were noted in The Matrix, where the action scenes had many 3D positional audio elements to them, as well as the dialogue.

Using several software DVD players, the six-channel audio worked well and did a great job positioning the source.

Music, movies and games all benefit from the six-chamber design of the ESound 5.1.

The Bass That Booms

The last test for the ESound was listening to a wide array of music. While the music wouldn't help us determine the accuracy of 5.1 channel audio, it did help compare how the USB device handles a range of frequencies. We used both Winamp 5 and Windows Media Player 9, and listened to MP3 tracks ripped with Exact Audio Copy and encoded with the LAME encoder using the alt-preset settings with variable bit rate.

At first, our Winamp player had been set to use the “Rock” equalizer preset and the music sounded horrible. The rock setting has just too much bass and the ESound was thumping the bass and drowning out the rest of the music. Our stereo headphones and Logitech speakers had previously sounded fine with this setting. Tweaking the settings for a while and ultimately settling on the “Ska” equalizer setting resulted in the ESound sounding crisp, clear, and balanced.

In testing all of the Winamp presets and playing around with the equalizer, it was obvious that the ESound emphasizes the bass way too much. Mids and highs weren't terrible, but with the wrong settings, they were drowned out or distorted and unfortunately it took a bit of tweaking to find that right setting.

We listened to a wide range of tracks — including Korn's “Y'all Want a Single” which features a ton of deep and fast bass and the growling and screaming vocals from singer Jon Davis. The ESound, and our ears, were overpowered by the bass on the “rock” setting, but bringing the bass down a bit made it sound excellent.

Another song that stood out in the ESound headphones was Pearl Jam's “Love Boat Captain” which also features a good range of vocals and instrumentation. The spectrum of tones came across clean and powerful.