Personal Home Theater Headphones

LTB 5.1 Personal Home Theater Headphones Review
By Kyle Kolbe

When you have a family, you constantly have to deal with differing sleep schedules. Toddle_o_Geek goes to bed by 8 PM, Wife_o_Geek passes out by 10 PM and I like to stay up till whenever. Those times when I stay up late or even when my wife is enjoying some other form of entertainment in another part of the house (usually Desperate Housewives) I can’t raise the home theater’s volume to a level where I can hear a Eastern Bloc commando sneaking up from my back left speaker. LTB Surround Headphone ads crept into my periphery vision while reading home entertainment magazines for the past few months. Curious, I checked out their website and immediately decided I couldn’t afford their nice wireless surround headphones. A few weeks ago, after reading one too many reviews involving wireless audio that mentioned hiss, I abandoned the wireless headphone idea likening it to leisurely riding a bicycle down an expressway, not pleasant. A scouring of a few online forums (they’re never wrong) led me back to LTB. Maybe I could afford some wired surround headphones.

My LTB 5.1 Personal Home Theater Headphones and AC3 amp (included) showed up about a week later with 2-day shipping (I always place online orders on Thursday evening, which ruins any chance for the immediate consumer satisfaction I was hoping for. when will the weekend join the rest of the week for shipping schedules? The weekend is so stuck up.).

The headphone set hooks up to your AV receiver, or directly to a DVD player, Xbox or PS2 through either the optical or coaxial digital audio output (only Dolby PCM and Dolby PCM supported, sorry DTS you get static). Since I switch all of my audio and most of my video through my Onkyo TX-DS989 AV receiver, I wanted to use its coax digital output to the LTB’s by switching on Record Out. The 989’s manual warned that the digital output would only pass the two front stereo channels. I was hoping whoever wrote/translated the manual was wrong (they were) about the digital output and that it passed a full Dolby Digital 5.1 signal.

After inventorying the boxes contents, I rummaged through my spare cable bin (I have lots of spare cables after moving everything downstairs and needing different cable lengths for connecting all the electronics in the new built-in cabinet to each other and out to the projector and loudspeakers half a room away) for a decent digital coax cable, my best spare was an old MIT (I’ve gone through many digital cables trying to tame a static breakup in loud male voices on movie soundtracks, I think what finally fixed it was my Anthem MCA 2 separate amp). Hook up is easy enough, just run the coax between the AV receiver’s digital output and the LTB’s AC3 amp (this is a tiny piece of kit that you can hide anywhere, a little larger than your typical USB 4-port hub, with a wall-wart power plug and inputs for digital coax and optical and an analog stereo passthrough). With the old standby philosophy, power on peripherals before the main unit, I first powered on the LTB AC3 amp and then the Onkyo, selected my source, pushed the front panel Rec Out button, started a movie and slipped on the headphones. I only heard hiss. I pressed the LTB amp’s only controls, plus and minus buttons, to no effect. I switched the unit off and on again (as always suggested by the IT Crowd’s Roy) and the headphones blasted my ears with the sounds from Zathura, the last DVD I watched that I remembered having some directional surround effects in the meteor shower in the living room scene. I guess the LTB needed to have a chance to lock into the signal.