Turtle Beach Elite Pro 2
A revamped flagship model to take on the best.
As you can tell by its superlativehoovering title and equally bold $299 price tag, Turtle Beach’s gen 2 Elite Pro isn’t messing about. It’s intended to provide competition to the very best headsets out there. And when you think of the very best out there, the likes of Astro’s A40, Steelseries’ Pro Wireless, and Sennheiser’s GSP 670 all spring to mind… except unlike all the aforementioned models, the Elite Pro 2 is wired.
It’s not a straight fight, then. Wired models are becoming increasingly rare at this price point, and although they still offer a response time and fidelity that wireless equivalents can’t quite match in pure numbers, the sheer quality of wireless cans in recent years has seen most of us ditch the cables. The Elite Pro 2 gives us a compelling reason to rethink, though.
First on that list is the comfort. As a journalist who’s often stayed in hotels booked on the company dime, I’m pretty sure I’ve slept on mattresses with less padding than these. It’s an absolutely phenomenal wedge of high quality, super-squishy memory foam surrounding each earcup, and just as with Razer’s foam earpads there’s a tiny recess for glasses frames which shows how much attention Turtle Beach’s designers are paying to comfort.
It’s comfortable. You get it. But the groundwork in ergonomics is matched when it comes to sound. This is always a matter of taste, of course, but to this reviewer’s ears the powerful thwomp delivered by an exaggerated low-end spike in the hardware EQ profile works brilliantly in-game.
No, they’re not a set of Beyerdynamic studio cans and they don’t give anything close to a flat response, but unless you were hoping to use the Elite Pro 2 with all your devices, and possibly mix Brian Eno’s next album with it, that’s not a problem.
Breaking the signal chain along your cable is Turtle Beach’s impressively titled Superamp, which turns a 3.5mm audio jack connection into a USB input to your output device.
Without the use of an additional app, controls on the Superamp are limited to volume and... Message ends. It’s a lovely volume dial, don’t get me wrong. It’s notched, and the lighting’s quite precise as it fills a bar to indicate your current level.
The mic mute, meanwhile, is controlled by an inline switch on the 3.5mm cable which feels like an odd layout. Most of the control is handled by a third method, though: Turtle Beach’s app. This combination of control layouts feels like the Elite Pro 2’s component parts have been retrofitted to work together. It’s not very becoming of the model name.
The Turtle Beach Elite Pro 2 for PC, PS4, and PS5 is a plush experience with stellar low-end response, but the weak mic and awkward on-cord control layout hold it back.
Phil Iwanuik