Performance:
Honestly I haven’t gotten much of a chance to test these; as it turned out my son saw them and took off with them before I got a chance to say anything. But I guess this is a good thing. From his perspective he likes the sound quality but what he really likes is the fit. My other gaming headset is not volume limiting and was designed primarily for adults. And while his head is pretty big, he finds they are a bit too heavy and move around on him during his “animated” game play. While he didn’t mention it, I am sure he also appreciates the silence of these PuroGamer’s. Not only because it helps isolate environmental sounds, but because these are very quiet headphones. Unlike some other units we have tested, there is no creaking of the hinges or slides as you move your head around or make adjustments. So really all you hear is what you were intended to hear. From the parent perspective; while the headset does block out ambient noises it doesn’t do this so much the user is not aware of what is going on around them. So far we have been 100% successful getting him to come for dinner and about 50% successful getting him to do homework.
In the limited use I had with the headset I found them to be very comfortable but a little snug for adults with large heads. They are easy to adjust the size from kids to adults. Even after wearing them for a while my ears seemed cooler than with your typical over the ear style headset. I was also fairly impressed with the sound reproduction but did occasionally wish for more bass. The big surprise for me was what 85dB sounds like. It was readily apparent that I have always listened to music at a volume that was just too high. Occasionally I wanted to make these louder when a good song came on and that just reinforced how much these are needed for kids. Listening at high volumes has a cumulative effect on your hearing and quite honestly, some of this is habit. So, if you can get these in a kids hands before they are used to such high volumes, they might not be looking to make the volume go to 11. Overall music reproduction was good and I didn’t notice any background noise in quiet parts. Since I am not a huge gamer I decided to test the included mic by placing a few phones calls. Again, the sound quality was great for playback and I was told my voice was clear even when I adjusted the flexible boom.
The control box is located about 18 inches from the headphone cup. I really like the placement, for both my son and me the controls end up right around your waist. This means it was easy to control the volume even in the dark, there was no fumbling around looking for it. This was especially important to my son who was not only adjusting the volume while gaming but also muting the mic at times. Within minutes it was just intuitive.
Plugging the PuroGamer into a PC is plug and play. When plugged in via USB there is a ring of blue light on each ear cup and at the tip of the mic. It looked nice enough that my son was upset they didn’t do this using the 3.5mm plug. I noticed no difference in sound quality between the 3.5mm jack and USB, both provided clear accurate sound.
One seemingly small thing is the abrasion resistant cabling. I am not sure how my son does it but typically all wires end up twisted and tangled to the point you want to pull your hair out. This abrasion resistant cover is great in this respect, it seems to be slick enough that loops slide apart easily and the extra thickness keeps the wire from really knotting up. In fact it works so well he can cram these in the included storage bag with no regard for cable management and they seem to emerge fine each time. I just hope I can get him to continue using the bag since it also seems to have reduced the occasional snag on some other wire which in turn causes some network issue.
