LOUD AND CLEAR

The APC team tests eight pairs of gaming headsets that’ll let you hear the action loud and clear — and even be heard over all that din, too.

We test eight pairs of gaming headsets that’ll let you hear the action loud and clear.

While we’d all love to be able to plug in a monstrous surround-sound audio system into our gaming rigs, for most of us, the reality is that a headset is far more practical... and a lot less disruptive to the other people we live with. As with gaming keyboards and mice, the market has become absolutely flooded with headsets over the last few years — everyone wants a slice of the still-relatively-healthy PC gaming space. There’s been a rather positive outcome to that glut, however, in that, unlike a decade ago, not all of them are garish-looking, overly-bassy abominations. There are some genuinely classy sets amongst those we tested — and (not coincidentally, we’re sure) they’re often the best-sounding ones too.

This month, we’ve reviewed headsets from as many major brands as possible, allowing vendors to submit just one set each. We received products at a variety of pricepoints, ranging from under $100 right up to $350... and we should point out that they’re not even the most expensive ones on the market. Venture into high-end wireless territory and you’ll find that prices skyrocket — we’ll take a dedicated look at the wireless category in a separate feature a bit further down the track.

HOW WE TESTED

If you’ve been reading APC for any length of time, you’ll know that, in every round-up, we let you know how we tested the gear. Usually this just involves a little annotation below our benchmarks table, listing what hardware we used and what tests we ran. However, we’ve already established that audio is an entirely different beast. We could look at base specifications for each headset, but in all honesty, that really doesn’t tell you much, and the true nature of audio lies in the listener experience — how the sound feels.

That said, we wanted to ensure we had a fair and balanced test bed for this roundup, so we decided on the following. Firstly, we connected every set via analog only — we wanted to ensure that no single company or manufacturer had any unfair advantage thanks to embedded soundcards, USB connections or other such tomfoolery.

In terms of audio testing, we listened to a variety of music from different musical genres, largely by streaming lossless FLAC 1,411kbps files from Tidal. Then it was straight into games, with a combination of modern titles including Star Citizen, Project Cars and Call of Duty: Black Ops III to gauge how exactly the headphones responded and felt under the different gaming genres. Ultimately, we’re looking at three different categories: comfort, style and, most importantly, overall soundscape.