Very comfortable headphones for long sessions. The microphone is a good sensitivity, and very uni-directional. I don't ever have to do anything "special" for people to understand me. I use default gain, and just put the mic near my mouth. I also never get complaints about background noise.
The stereo sound on these is good for gaming, and good for background music, but don't expect any critical listening. Sounds are clear, if not a bit hollow and wide/distant, no matter the source material.
I do not use the USB DAC that came with it. It's quite frankly, junk, and in all cases so far, I've gotten better results using the on-board sound card on whatever machine I plug them into. The added distortion and falsified surround, most of which appears to be gained using reverb, just isn't worth having the alternate sound card for output. Positioning of the sounds is also only so-so when using the virtualized surround in most games.
Plugging them into a nicer DAC/AMP brings them to life. I cannot stress this point enough. These headphones are severely limited by the sound card you plug them into. Plugging them into the on-board jacks sounded good. Plugging them into a Xonar Essence STX (with its dedicated power connector for amp and op amps) sounded noticeably better, especially where bass impact is concerned.
Isolation on them is good, but background noise is still possible in a noisy room. Nothing that turning them up a little bit won't fix. Volume is more than sufficient for just about any environment using a basic sound card.
Over all, I'm very happy with these and would recommend them to most people looking for good gaming audio.
I don't get any static at all by putting its inline volume to 100%, but the left channel is significantly louder than the right channel when it's set to something around 30%. So most of the time I adjust the volume with Windows controls.
The driver worked very well and reliably for me, with no issues, but the build quality seems ****ty to me, as it's made out of some really cheap plastic and it just keeps emitting weird clicking sound when I handle it. By that sound I can judge that it won't take long for them to break apart.
Anyway, the audio quality is totally bad. It does recreate bass pretty well, but that's it. I shall say, it *ONLY* recreates bass. Everything else is ridiculously low in quality. Buying these was the worst decision in my life. You can get a much better value for the money if you just buy the USB dongle that comes with it (~30$), and then buying some cheap headphones + a cheap microphone. The quality just can't be worse.
By the way, I have tested the dongle with some different headphones - the driver installs without any issues and recognizes it as G430, and the surround sound works just well - sometimes even better.