ASUS TUF GAMING H7 WIRELESS
When the going gets TUF, are Asus’s 53mm drivers up to the job?
THE HEADSET marketplace is pretty crowded. SteelSeries has had the wireless cans game cornered for the past few years with its Arctis line, but in turn that product’s popularity has probably, dislodged any misgivings gamers had about going wireless. Won’t there be latency? Do they have a high noise floor? Will I hear passing truck drivers chatting on their CB radios? Thanks to the Arctis headsets, these old wives’ tales of wireless are no more, and everyone’s looking to ditch a cable or two.
The result is a breadth of options in 2020 that’s so voluminous you could lose days to researching and weighing up your options. But this TUF Gaming H7, from a manufacturer much better known for its components than its peripherals, is a real contender. It’s comfortable, well presented, and thanks to a set of huge 53mm drivers, pretty powerful, too.
The H7s feature a completely different design from other headsets in the Asus fold, adopting a floating headband design that uses lightweight plastic surrounded by a cushioned and elasticated exterior below the skeleton of the headset itself, which is made from black brushed aluminum. The idea behind it is obviously to keep as much of the 14oz total weight off the top of your head, either through clamping force in the earcups or the stretchy headband. And it works, too, bolstered by generous cushioning around the earcups and a very soft breathable fabric surrounding it. Despite weighing in at the heavier end of the market’s spectrum, these don’t dig in over time or give you the ear sweats.
The interface is all located at the rear of the left-hand earcup, and it’s standard stuff: a volume scroll wheel at the top, then a mute switch, and a power button at the base. All are easily located and operated while wearing the H7s, so points to Asus there. At the very bottom of the cup is a micro-USB socket for charging (the battery life’s a respectable 15 hours, so you’ll only need to hook this up every couple of days), and further toward the front is the input for the detachable mic. The mic itself is easy to position and stays where you put it, providing reasonable noise cancelation when the mechanical keyboard gets a-clickin’. It’s not the fullest sound we’ve tested lately, but there’s very little noise floor, and you’ll certainly be heard loud and clear over Discord.
Use Asus’s Armory software, though, and you can get the mic sounding much better, up there with the clearest and most full-bodied on the market. And, frankly, you’ll need to use Armory, because the H7s come with virtual surround enabled by default. A trip into the software is required to switch back to the far superior and more usable stereo output. This isn’t a deal-breaker, obviously, but it is an annoyance, because Armory is quite bulky compared to other peripheral tweaking programs. And in an ideal world, you’d be able to use a headset without the need for any software at all, wouldn’t you?
And what about those monstrous drivers? Well, in a few specific scenarios, they sound great. Action games, shooters, RPGs—anything in which things are likely to combust with any frequency, really. The sheer heft of the bass response really sells these moments. However, the H7s don’t clean up quite well enough for the more delicate moments. The walk through the mystic glade in said RPG. The contemplative “We were just following orders” moment in shooters. Here, the bass tends to color the overall sound a bit too warm and loose, lacking articulation higher up the EQ register. Not to a disastrous degree, by any means, but it’s a more limited sound than—yes— SteelSeries’s Arctis 7s offer.
There’s plenty to like, then: great build, great comfort, and great sound in the more bombastic titles in your collection. It’s just held back a little by low-end gorging, and an odd call to enable virtual surround by default.