Well I decided to give the Turtle Beach headphones a go. I went to BestBuy and picked up the PX5s, since the XP500 was not yet available, and I get the benefit of easy/instant return at BB.
The headphones themselves are fairly comfortable. When I put them on my head, the earcups don't quite fully get around my ears, so there is a little contact between the edges of my ears and the inside rim of the pads. However, over the past 2 days I wore them fairly extensively (probably 5+ continuous hours each day at least) and did experience any discomfort. My ears got a little warm because they're a closed design, but it wasn't really an issue. Comfort wise I think I could live with these headphones. The only thing I could really see improving here are slightly bigger ear cups to remove any "ear contact" (but then they may be too big and not fit on my head well) and maybe a weight reduction. They're not heavy, and I don't really notice. The phones and the transmitter unit do feel a little cheap which is a slight letdown for a product that's this expensive. I don't think it's going to break on me, but it definitely feels substantially cheaper than it costs. Oh also the buttons on the headsets have a little "jiggle" to them, so if you shake your head you can hear the plastic buttons rattle, which is annoying.
Sound wise, my initial impressions were a little disappointing. The first thing I noticed when I turned them on was that I could hear some hiss. It wasn't really loud but it was definitely present and noticeable. To test the performance, I first hooked it up to my 360. I booted the console and navigated some of the menus to make sure it was working. Admittedly, the first time I did this, I thought that I had not connected it properly because I heard the sound but it felt like it was coming from my TV speakers and not the headphones (which in reality was impossible since my TV speakers are set to 0 volume). There was this strange "transparency" to the sound, most likely from the DH processing. The first game I tried was Bioshock 2. Playing through Bioshock 1 and 2 on my surround sound speakers (and in the dark) was a positively transforming experience, I think BS/BS2 has about the
best sound I have ever heard in a game, both in the sounds themselves, and the surround sound immersing you in as you hear water splashing and trickling all around you. Again I was pretty disappointed at the results with the PX5. I got what seemed to be pretty severe distortion while playing the game. And I mean pretty severe. Action scenes were just a jumbled mess every time there was some kind of explosion or a gun firing. I really don't remember it sounding that bad on my speakers, so I was a little let down. I played some single player and also did a few rounds in multiplayer which is pretty rare for me. Although for now I didn't bother hooking up the mic and testing that, just the sound from the headphones.
Next I popped in Forza 4, but only tried that briefly as there isn't as much surround/directionality in the game. The third game I tried was Red Dead Redemption, another game which had pretty immersive and well-done sound in my opinion. My experience with RDR was somehow quite a bit better than Bioshock 2, I didn't really notice any distortion in the sound.
After my experience with the games, I was a little let down. I so wanted these headphones to work out well, but it seemed like they were not going to be a workable solution for me.
Next I hooked them up to my mac mini, via spdif. I wanted to hear how bad the distortion was going to be from playing music, so I scrounged around in my music library for some examples. Most of my music is ALAC, or high-bitrate MP3. I tried to find some tracks with somewhat heavy bass to midbass content as I was trying to get the same frequencies as the action in Bioshock 2. To my surprise, however, I didn't really notice any distortion. The music was coming through pretty clean. I tried hooking the headphones to my mac mini and ipod touch via bluetooth, and again I experienced no real distortion issues.
Then I wanted to test the wireless functionality at range, so I walked around my apartment. My apartment's really small, but still when I got to the bathroom (maybe only 10-15 feet away but through a wall or two) the sound cut out. The range definitely seems pretty limited, but at the same time my apartment is totally
inundated with wifi routers (I can see probably like 15-20 router signals from my computer), so interference could be playing the bigger role here. I think the 5.8GHz band of the Mixamp would fare a lot better in this situation. Nevertheless, when sitting at my couch I didn't really experience any issue. I did hear some pops/dropouts, but for the most part it worked okay.
Revisiting the hiss, in practice it has turned out to be a much less substantial issue than I originally thought. Either other sounds quickly overpower it, or I mentally adjust and no longer really notice the hiss. Especially if something is actually playing through the headphones.
I hooked my PC up to the base unit by running a long optical cable from my PC into the other room where the base unit was. In the final setup, the transmitting base is basically just behind a wall from where I sit at my PC. I didn't really experience transmission issues with the headphones when sitting at the PC. I tried playing some Star Trek Online, and Starcraft 2. Again, as with RDR, I did'nt really notice any sound distortion while playing these games. I turn the music in STO off, and since parts of the game are very quiet with no music, I was able for the first time to actually hear the background hiss along with the game audio. In starcraft 2 I didn't notice any hiss. I tried to hook up the mic to my computer using bluetooth (my PC mobo has a built-in bluetooth adapter) abut while I was able to pair it to the PC, it was totally unusable due to extremely poor signal reception. I suspect this is more a failing of bluetooth on my PC rather than a problem with the headset. Bluetooth worked just fine on both my mac mini and ipod touch, and I had previously tried to connect a bluetooth mouse to my PC and experienced the similar problems (poor tracking indicative of extremely poor signal reception). I guess the bluetooth antenna on my mobo backplate is just too constrained in terms of positioning (right next to a large noisy metal box full of electronics) to be of any practical value. If I use the mic on my PC I'll need to run a cable from the headphones to the mic jack.
Finally I did some brief testing with a couple blu-rays. As I suspected, one cannot hear blu-rays with these headphones if the audio track is DTS-MA, as the transmitter lacks the capability to decode DTS. I had to change the audio output to simple stereo to hear anything there. For Blu-rays with DD5.1, it works fine. My blu-ray testing is less than rigorous since the only blu-rays I own are the BBC Natural History collection. They have some blu-rays with DTS and some with DD5.1, but the sounds in these programs are pretty low key. There is not too much use of surround, LFE, etc. mainly just narration and some background. But using the headphones worked pretty good for the DD5.1 blu-ray I watched, and the sound was again fine (no distortions). BTW the BBC natural history collections are fantastic, fantastic programs.
So what's the result so far? I'm really torn. I need to go back and do more testing on the 360, because that was where I heard the worst sound. I am really not sure why the sound in Bioshock 2 was so bad. Perhaps it was that I wasn't using the right headphone "preset" settings, since that was only about 10-15 minutes after I took the headphones out of the box. Maybe the sound in Bioshock 2 really IS that bad, and using headphones just let me hear the flaws in the audio more clearly, maybe the frequency response of BS2 just happens to not match with the PX5 well? Maybe I'm hearing compression due to the DD5.1 encoding, compared to the lossless PCM signal I use when listening to music, I really don't know. I will need to test that game again, also more thoroughly test some other games I have. Listening to music and other sources of audio seemed a lot better though, no real distortion problems. Soundstage on the headphones feels pretty good though. I am not hardcore into competitive FPS so I can't really say much about positional accuracy, but the "sound field" feels pretty good and is pretty immersive. These are just amateur observations though since I am not really an expert on soundstage and have limited experience with other headphones by which to compare.
I am really rooting for these headphones, because as far as convenience and versatility, these headphones are exactly what I am looking for. I was able to hook it up to all 3 devices I want to use, even get bluetooth functionality between it and my ipod touch, and the wireless reception seems pretty good for my particular setup, which arguably is a challenging enviroment given how many wifi signals are in my building. Being totally wire-free is a HUGE plus for me. I can't even imagine having to walk around with
10 feet of PC360 cable coiled up leading to a Y adapter and then into a mixamp receive dongle. Sound-wise, I was initially very let down by my experience in bioshock 2, but after continued use I have been a lot more satisfied by the results. The wireless connection seems pretty good, although somewhat limited on range. I do get the occasional pop which is annoying. I guess the bottom line is if these headphones, with what flaws they may have, are worth the $250, and can I look beyond the perceived flaws in audio quality in order to keep the excellent versatility/usability of these headphones? There seem to be some definite drawbacks in quality, some aspects of the phones feel quite "chintzy" or cheap, and probably sound quality suffers somewhat (distortion, hiss) compared to more dedicated sets of heapdhones, but the package as a whole is pretty good. I'm going to need to give them a little mroe time to make a final decision. If these were say $150, I'd likely have no reservations about keeping them, but at $250, they may need to bring more to the table.
HOLY CRAP that was a LOT longer than I intended it to be. Congrats for those of you who made it through the whole thing...
Ruahrc
