These headphones are the shit.
I mean that. The reviews on Newegg seem to be evenly divided between four and five stars, but I’ve found them to be incredible during a single night of usage. The surround sound is as good or better than my THX speakers with rich sound response, crisp sound, and definite directional audio. I tested the set-up with the opening scene of Gladiator, the Battle of Pelennor Fields from The Return of the King, and the lightsaber battle between Obi-Wan and Anakin from Revenge of the Sith. In every case, sounds moved from back to front, sometimes startling me.
Next, I tried the new Team Fortress 2 beta. In such a chaotic game, it was difficult to really distinguish the positional audio, but the sound experience was as richly detailed as playing through my normal speakers. Company of Heroes was a better game to test the positional audio. As I scrolled around the maps, I could hear the differences in sound, and each sound had a definite direction and intensity based on my position on the overall map. In fact, I would say that the headphones were better than my 5.1 set-up. I tried Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, the stealth spy/shooter from Tom Clancy as a real test of the positional audio, and found that the game scared me more often than not. nVidia may claim that “this is they way it’s meant to be played” but sound does more for immersion for me than graphics.
The last thing I tried was a series of music. I used Dream Theater’s Images and Words album, the London Symphony Orchestra’s recording of The 1812 Overture, and various MP3′s from my collection. In all cases, I found the sound quality to be superb. CD Audio sounds the best, of course, but these headphones have the fidelity to actually allow you to distinguish between high quality MP3s and CD’s. That’s not usual in a headset designed for gaming.
I do have a few caveats: The headphones require a great deal of tweaking in your sound card settings. I’m currently using an Audigy X-Fi card, and I found that I had to change the crystallizer settings, tweak the EQ, mess with the volume settings, and manage the volume levels on the in-line control box on the headphones before I finally found my sweet spot. My initial impression was that the bass response was weak, but after a few minutes of tweaking, the bass was enough to rattle my teeth. It was actually uncomfortable, which is nothing something that I would have ever expected from a set of headphones. The only complaint that I have is that the headset came with a splitter that would allow you to run both your headphones and your external speakers at the same time. Unfortunately, the splitter seems to be mis-wired. When I performed the positional sound test with the splitter in-line, the right and left channels come out of the left cup on the headphones and the left speaker on my THX setup. I’ve taken the splitter out of line and will just manually switch between the speakers and the headphones for now. I’m hoping that an email to Turtle Beach will clear up the problem.