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Date |
: May 25th, 2001 |
| Category |
: Audio |
| Manufacturer |
: Evergreen |
| Author |
: Jin-Wei Tioh |
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Sound quality is where things really start to get funky. Without force feedback enabled, the sound quality is very good. Overall clarity and sound imaging are good, with the large ear cups providing a warm, "full" feel to the sound. However, there are still some faults. There is a very slight bass deficiency in the midrange, coupled with an occasional minor lack of clarity in some songs. All is forgiven when the force feedback mode is activated. Sound takes on a new dimension (as silly as that might sound). You are immersed and can "feel" gun shots, explosions, kicks, punches, the whole works. While it did not improve my frag count, the force feedback did add significantly to the overall enjoyment of games, lots more "fun factor". This is coupled with the universal advantage that surround technologies such as EAX and A3D frequently sound better on headphones, even though you have only 2 "speakers". I ran through an entire list of games, and Clive Barker's Undying, Giants, Heavy Metal FAKK 2, Descent 3, Evolva, Revenant as well as Nox really came alive. Even oldies such as Starcraft, Command & Conquer, The Pandora Directive and Full Throttle were a different experience on the RumbleFX. Of special mention is American McGee's Alice. Trust me, you want to hear Alice's music through the RumbleFX.
Whoever said you can't have too much of a good thing is a little off the mark. In games with lots of heavy bass action (eg. Quake III Arena, Unreal Tournament), the constant vibrations were a little too much with explosions all over the place. To get the unit to a more pleasant level, I had to revert to the "I" force feedback setting, sometimes in addition to adjusting the sound card's equalizer to trim the bass down. Additionally, the bass level in some games simply did not make sense. In Unreal Tournament, the Enforcer sounds heavier than the minigun and explosions caused by the rocket launcher. Frankly, the games, rather than the RumbleFX were at fault here, but it does make you wonder what the game designers were thinking. The games that were tested (on a SBLive! and FrontX CPX equipped system) :
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3DMark 2001 Pro - Game Demo
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American McGee's Alice
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Clive Barker's Undying
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C&C - Tiberian Dawn
- C&C -
Tiberian Sun
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Descent 3
- Evolva
- Full
Throttle
- Freespace
1
- Freespace
2
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Giants
- Heavy
Metal FAKK 2
- Nox
- Quake III Arena
- Red Alert 2
- Redneck
Racing
- Revenant
- Starcraft
- The Pandora Directive
- Unreal Tournament
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Force feedback does not necessarily mean that the unit will vibrate all the time, rather I found that it provides extra "fullness", or if you're listening to heavy bass music, more "ooomph". For sampling music, a Nakamichi RE-3 was utilized. All sorts of songs were sampled :
- Appalachian
Spring - Aaron Copland
- Whistle Down the
Wind - Andrew Lloyd Weber
- Phantom of the
Opera - Andrew Lloyd Weber
- Cats - Andrew Lloyd
Weber
- The Young Person's
Guide to the Orchestra - Benjamin Britten
- Beer Thirty - Brooks &
Dunn
- Take the
"A" Train - Duke Ellington and His Famous
Orchestra
- Farandole from
L'Arlesienne Suite No. 2 - Georges
Bizet
- Rollin' - Limp
Bizkit
- Spybreak!
(Short One) - Propellerheads
- Bang On! -
Propellerheads
- Du Hast - Rammstein
- Smooth - Santana ft.
Rob Thomas
- In Blue, Unplugged,
Talk on Corners - The Corrs
- Looking Through
Your Eyes - The Corrs
After a week of listening to music with the RumbleFX, I was hooked to the effect provided. The vibrations generated by the built-in transducers make most of the songs sound unique, and if I might venture, more enjoyable as well. As mentioned earlier, the midrange in some songs did not sound so clear and could at times be a little flat. But overall, it was a positive experience.
The last test was movie playback. Since movies are like games (ie. they have music as well as sound effects), I expected the RumbleFX to perform similarly. A Phillips DVD725 deck was used in conjunction with the following movies :
- Armageddon
- Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
- Dragon Heart
- Gladiator
- Jurassic Park
- Meet Joe Black
- Star Wars : The Phantom Menace
- Terminator 2 :
Judgment Day
- The Matrix
- Waterboy
- X-Men
The RumbleFX did not disappoint, but it still did suffer from the same deficiencies as when it was tested with games. As examples, in Jurassic Park and Terminator 2, the recorded bass in some scenes (eg. the T-rex chase in Jurassic Park) did manage to overwhelm the RumbleFX, rendering the sound produced to be distorted and "splattered". The vibrations produced by the transducers would have easily measured 10 on the Richter scale, in short intolerable. Keep in mind that the RumbleFX, is well, head rumbling rather than chess thumping. If you want the latter effect, you would still need a proper subwoofer.
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