Sound:
Music:
All fancy stuff aside, a headset HAS to produce great sound. I would be astonished to find someone who only uses their headset for gaming, and never listens to music on it. So with that said I fired up a wide range of music and spent an hour or so listening to it. One of my favorite songs for testing any audio device for sound quality reproduction is from the Eagles: Hell Freezes Over Live sound track â€" Hotel California. It is a great piece with clear lows, highs and just an awesome song. I can say that the Arctic Cooling P531 reproduced this song very well.
I did need to go into the included software and change the equalizer to the “Classic” setting to really bring out the vibrancy of this piece. However, after setting that I left it set there as it seems to bring the best sound to all of the music, movies, and games I tested. Of course it’s biggest failing here is the deep bass reproduction; it is nearly if not impossible to reproduce deep booming base inside a set of headphones. While it was acceptable, it’s no replacement for full speakers.
TV/Movies:
I’m not normally a person who watches TV or Movies on my PC, aside from an occasional Family Guy episode from Hulu, that is. But I fired up Independence Day and watched the movie from start to finish. It was more enjoyable than I expected it would be (not the movie, I’ve seen the move plenty of times - but the viewing experience). Again, while the sound was very good the lack of booming bass was noticeable.
Next is the surround sound reproduction. While I could say I could hear all the sounds, being able to actually tell that, for example, an alien ship was firing at one of the F/A-18s from behind and to the right was not something I could discern. I really think that again it’s just not able to produce the same effects as could be produced from a traditional 5.1 speaker package. While I could hear sounds that I wouldn’t have been able to hear from a normal stereo headset, I couldn’t place the sound as coming from behind me.
Games:
Now, let’s get to the meat of what this headset was designed for... Gaming. All kinds of gaming, and lot’s of it. To give the headset its fair dues I picked a couple of games to test with. Unfortunately, as I stated earlier, I do most (if not all) of my FPS gaming on my Xbox, so I had to find something to fill that role. Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare filled that role, as I already had the demo on my system (sadly they don’t have a playable demo of COD:MW2), I also chose DDO:EU, and finally I chose Dragon Age: Origins.
The sound quality from these games was an improvement over the stereo headsets I was using before. The bass was more pronounced, but again didn’t rise to the level of booming bass one would expect from traditional 5.1 speakers. Also, as before, there were sounds from all around, but again I was unable to tell where they were coming from other than left or right. It did however elevate the experience beyond what I have gotten from a good pair of stereo headsets. I can say it does add more to the game play experience than I got from any of the other stereo headsets (USB or otherwise) I have used.
Microphone:
The included microphone is on one of the most flexible mounts I have seen on a headset, and unfortunately this may be its downfall. The Microphone really doesn’t ever seem to get in a great position, not because you can’t put the end piece where it should be, but the mic itself seems to get out of place and isn’t in direct line with your mouth. From the people I have played with they can notice when it’s out of line, and even when it’s readjusted they say they cannot hear me as clear as they could on a Logitech ClearChat Pro USB headset. If there is one downside I found to this headset , the mic would be it.
Comfort:
In an effort to get a feel for the comfort of wearing a noticeably heaver headset I fired up DDO:EU for the weekend and set about putting in some hours. It was a tough job, but someone had to do it. I can say that after many hours over the weekend with stretches of 4 or better hours of almost constant wearing I did notice that the headset was on, and by the end of the weekend I was ready to have them off. It’s not that they were uncomfortable; it was just having them on for that long was a bit tiresome. If you are a person who games for hours at a time anyway, I doubt you will have any problems with the comfort of these headsets.
For reference, here is a size comparison with the more compact Logitech ClearChat Pro USB headset.
As you can see the headset is quite a bit larger than the more standard Logitech stereo headset. But with four speakers in each earcup, this is to be expected. One of my main concerns with this would be the weight of the headset, and the comfort level of wearing it for long gaming sessions.
