What are the advantages/disadvantages of 3,5mm and USB headsets?

Well, a 3.5mm connection will use your sound card or onboard sound whereas the USB will use its own system that bypasses anything you have installed. Basically, if you have a good sound card or even halfway decent onboard, you're going to want to use a standard connection type headset to take advantage of all the features of the sound card. If you have bad onboard or don't want to pony up for a good sound card, get a USB headset because it will use its own internal sound processor to deliver the sound to you and ignore anything you have installed in your system for sound.

i do not have a clue

Then why post? I said it before, but seriously, what is it with you and your ocmpulsion to post in EVERY topic, regardless of whether you have something to say.


On topic, I would say go with 3.5mm if you want best sound quality, cause then you can use a sound card, which will give you much higher quality than a crappy USB sound card (which is what is in the USB headset)

Really depends on what you are doing, if its just for chat, sure USB will be just great, but if its more, like gaming or music, 3.5mm EVERY day of the week

+1 on the 3.5mm. Any recent motherboard should have good enough onboard for headphones.

+1

I like my Realtek HD onboard over my old Creative Audigy 2 ZS. Plus the Realtek HD lets me use my microphone to automatically adjust my 5.1 speakers like with a home theater receiver. That's a big bonus . Plus it enables sound on all speakers. I know my Audigy 2 ZS could do that too, but never found the option on the Vista/Win 7 software. It was on the Xp though.

have you tried kX drivers? they work really well on vista/win7, with older creative cards afaik

If you have high impedence headphones (not that likely on 3.5mm jacks), you might find that the soundcard can't drive them all that well. A moot point really, but bigger cans (even down-converted to 3.5mm) won't always play ball.

If u got a nice sound card or integrated sound you might wanna go with 3.5mm otherwise go USB, cause like XPetezX said, that usb headset will become ure "soundcard" when u connect it.

I don't consider myself an audio buff - but for me I like the simplicity of my dedicated sound card for my surround sound speakers and a USB headset w/mic


I'm also rather lazy and never run the front sound jack wires from the case to my motherboard which I would certainly want to do if I were plugging in headphones (instead of plugging them into the rear I/O panel). So USB from one of the front USB ports just works better for me.

I would say that unless you are a real audio buff and you want to invest in a good set of 3.5mm headphones, that you probably won't notice the difference between one or the other.

I disagree with most people here. Unless you have a high-end standalone soundcard, USB all the way. In addition, I've found that USB headsets have a longer lifespan as well.

I use the unofficial apps CD that is bundled with Daniel K's driver package, and the official Creative driver...





I'm not sure they're quite 100% working in Vista/7 yet, and they are much better for music production and making use of individual channel routing (e.g. 2 stereo outs, 4 mono outs, 6 mono ins) rather than gaming/VoIP etc