Zalman Theatre6 5.1 Surround Sound Headphone Review Author: Alan Wong Date Posted: September 29th, 2003 SLRating: Bottom Line: Zalman is starting to expand into another field, audio hardware. With impressive surround sound capability and the wide variety of other speakers and headphones available, will the Zalman Theatre6 ZM-RS6F be right for you? Read on to find out in our official review....... Article Navigation Introduction Features Test Setup Speaker Set Up Testing Results Conclusions Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 >> Discuss This Article

Testing Results

In Unreal Tournament 2003, sound was flawless. Voices, background sound, and music was heard very clearly. There was enough bass emitted from the headphones to make gamers feel the explosions.

In using the Theatre6 to listen to DVD Surround Sound was quite disappointing. The Zalman manual recommended to use Win DVD 4 or Power DVD 4, however both of these software are out of date, since version 5 of both of them are already out.

The newer versions of these DVD player software do not support surround sound for the Zalman Theatre6 (only the old versions did,; that is why Zalman recommended using the older versions). When playing Scene 1 from "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" Widescreen DVD, voices from the center channel and front left and right channels were not audible. Only when I set nVidia SoundStorm to "Dolby Surround Encoding" was I able to hear all the voices and sounds, but that wouldn’t be true surround sound then. *Note "Dolby Surround" means that the computer uses the 5.1 channel and bbasically turns it into 2-channels. Despite that fact, the quality of the sound was good. Currently, the test setup used was a nForce2 Motherboard integrated 5.1 Sound. You may be able to achieve true 5.1 channel sound with other sound cards (and maybe with different software other than nVidia SoundStorm).

For music testing, 50 Cent’s "In the Club" was used to see if bass was strong and to see if voices were heard clearly. Bass was strong and the rapping voices were heard very clearly. We also used Lifehouse’s "Somewhere in Between" with the same expectations of clarity and high bass. The results were the same, exceptional clarity and strong bass. Playback of music was excellent.

Conclusions

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Article Navigation Introduction Features Test Setup Speaker Setup Testing Results Conclusions

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