New headset

[Les]

Originally Posted by Splitter

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BUT! If I could find ear phones that regulated loud sounds I would be heaven. Sort of bringing everything to a common level of amplification...

I don't know of any headphones that do that. But your question got me thinking I'd like to find something like that for myself, so I went searching and to cut a very long story short I ended up finding this -

http://store.claessonedwards.com/product_p/bap-002.htm

It's a computer program that can pretty much do what you were asking for.

I downloaded the demo and tested it out briefly in IL-2 and on some music. To test the program to an extreme though, I loaded up Crysis to try and bring gunfire and jungle sounds onto the same level, and it pretty much does what it claims to do. In fact it was actually jaw-dropping when I first heard what it could really do.

With some extreme adjustments, basically all the quiet background sounds that sometimes you don't hear at all, can be made as loud as the closest, loudest sounds. You can then turn down the overall sound and not miss a thing. Even in the Crysis menu's I was hearing stuff I never even knew was there.

In IL-2 it was still bringing all the sounds together into a narrow range, but there aren't any great extremes to cover anyway. Planes flying by, ground guns, radio-chatter, hits to the plane, were all brought into roughly the same volume range as the engine, or closer than they were before anyway.

I can see why people would love (or hate) using such a program to alter music too, but I'm not going there.

I found the most extreme settings for bringing all the sound levels into line included using one slider that degraded the overall sound a bit, but that particular one isn't essential and it's not like it totally ruins everything. (It's described in the program itself as making things sound overall 'not unlike FM radio').

Oh, and what it can do for the bass is just BS.

Anyway, just sharing the info. I don't even know if I'd use it myself, but my first impressions are it's a top quality bit of software. From what I could see it's the best software of it's kind for it's price (at about thirty dollars).