As others also have done, I went for the recent GameDAC sale, and gave it a try tonight on the Xbox One with COD: Black Ops 4. Impressions can be summed up as: I am happy with the G6, and definitely X7, over it.
- Very underpowered even at "High" gain. My 598's are not that hard to drive and I need to turn the unit up close to 100% to get it acceptably loud. Running it direct from the unit, there is hiss at high volumes.
- Tried my Koss ESP950 using its lineout into the Koss Energizer. Eliminated the hiss, but still needed to crank it to 100% volume as well.
- The stage is closed in and overly reverby. Definitely has the "sounds like you are in a box," effect which is undesirable. On a revealing headphone that does not really have a very wide natural stage like the Koss, it was basically unlistenable. (SBX on the Koss, on the other hand, creates a very nice and large artificial stage). On the HD598 it was more tolerable and I more or less got used to it, but it still sounded overly artificial.
- The channel separation is too abrupt. It is more or less like stereo in how shifting your view abruptly moves sound from one speaker to another. 5.1 shows its limitations here when there is not adequate panning from one channel to another. I wouldn't say rear cues were well defined other than rear left and rear right. Inadequate panning meant there was no real "behind" you audio cues since it really wants to put the noise in one rear channel or the other.
- It's very bright. Almost piercing. Treble noises like gunshots are super loud while other frequencies are not as high, which is a problem since you need to put the volume up high to hear mostly everything else.
- I love the OLED screen. It is super useful to control this from that screen rather than on your PC.
- I did not mess with the chat functionality but it seems easier for microphone purposes than the G6 or X7, especially given the OLED menu. It even has an EQ which I am a huge sucker for.
I will give it some more time and maybe mess with the EQ, but, I think my curiosity about this device is more or less satiated. Adequate if you have very easy to drive headphones that are not super revealing, like a lot of headsets, and you need chat. At $65 I'd say it's an interesting cheap foray into VSS, but at their non sale price I would say purchase anything else. (My opinion.)