First impressions
First impressions are of a solidly built headset that is surprisingly light given its chunky build. The mike is mounted on a solid looking boom and encased within a circular plastic housing while the speakers are again in a plastic and a steel mesh effect casing. Two rounded plastic coated bars join the two halves together whilst an elasticated band under these provide for size adjustment. Each earpiece has a comfy soft foam pad for a comfortable fit. So all in all the headset looks like it means business and feels well built and manufactured. Closer inspection reveals few if any areas of poor fitting or build quality, and though these are nowhere near the price range of a set of Sennheisers, they don’t feel like a they belong at the cheaper end of the headset market either.
In use the elasticated band is perfectly tensioned to provide an instant fir for any size of head. There’s no mucking about adjusting sliding arms or fiddling with ratchets behind the earpieces as the band takes care of all of that. You just pull them on until they’re comfy and leave it at that. This is great for those ‘Here, listen to this!’ moments as well as allowing you to whip the headset off without worrying about accidentally pulling the things from your size fitting that you spent ages getting comfy with.
The boom mike is adjustable for either right or left hand side use and unlike many other headsets, it comes round just that little bit further. This is important as quite often voice comms depend on a clear pick up from the mike. You can spend ages fiddling with your microphone settings only to either still be too faint or over modulating in everyone else’s ears all because of your mike positioning. If the mike just can’t reach far enough around your face you can find yourself nearly shouting just to be heard.
Mike pick up is good and because of that broad surface area, it’s crystal clear in both Team Speak and Ventrillo as well as Skype. There’s a very small baffle in there which helps in some measure to counter ‘popping’ on ‘p’ and ‘b’. Testing just using duplex playback through Windows, there’s none of the tinny or muffled sound quality you get with smaller ‘pin hole’ type mikes or mikes with big foam baffles on them. It has to be said that the mike sensitivity might need knocking down within your soundcard’s control panel though as even though the mike is directional, the large pick up area can transmit unwanted background noises too.
