Alfreido's Blog

I recently went out and bought a new headset, something fancy and with some decent noise-cancellation because the amount of noise in my house rivals that of a plane taking off. I happened to notice that Austin Computers was having a sale for the Zalman 5.1 headsets and I thought, why not, I’ve never had surround sound headphones before, let’s give them a try.

After having an extensive test for them for a couple of days, I’ve been left with one word: Meh.

Setting up

One of my first gripes with this headset is one which a lot of companies do when they release new hardware: they try and rewrite the colour standards. See, the current standard for 5.1 setups is the green cord for the front-left and front-right speakers, black for the back-left and back-right speakers and orange for the center speaker and subwoofer. Zalman, in their infinite wisdom, decided to go for 3 shades of grey for their cords. Hey, that’s like the Australian government putting down a couple of traffic lights with 3 shades of grey, and telling you to discern which one means which. Now, before you go and tell me that I’m a stupid-head and that there are instructions, my point is… why try and rewrite the standard in colour codes and force people to read your instruction manual when you could simply put the correct colours in and make it plug and play. Amazingly, if you got the headset and microphone combo, the microphone cord end is red, still a deviation from the standard pink, but at least it has some colour. Maybe the division which constructed the microphone wasn’t bored shitless.

Mind you, once I had worked out how to plug in the headphones, setting the rest up was relatively easy. Simply switching Windows to a 5.1 setup and adjusting volumes accordingly.

Using it

Now here we come to the second gripe. I don’t know what the Zalmans staffs’ wives put into their morning breakfast, but it obviously was a drug which suppressed a person’s common sense. Who the bloody hell releases a computer headset without an inline volume control? It might possibly be that Zalman aren’t targeting gamers (although they would be the ones most likely to pick up this headset), but gamers are usually locked into their game and cannot change the volume easily. An inline volume control connected to the headset would’ve worked wonders in this case, but alas, it is nowhere to be found.

The headphones are foldable, they fold up into a nice little pack which you can store somewhere quite easily, then unpack it when you need to use it. I’m not sure how long it will last, but it is a nice feature.

The actual noise-cancellation of the headphones is quite nice. The headphones seal quite well when put on, and blocks out a lot of the outside volume, and when you play something on loud volume, I will bet you that you will not be able to hear your mother screaming at you to get to bed. Like most headphones with cushion around the edge, if you wear the headphones for too long, your ears start to get sweaty and muggy. But it actually wasn’t as bad as other headsets I have worn before.

The Sound

I must admit, the headphones take a little getting used to. The actual surround sound is quite nifty, but for some reason, I much prefer my 5.1 speaker system, which is also a lot clearer. Of course, it pisses off the rest of the family, but you win some, you lose some The clarity of these headphones is not very impressive. Especially when I turned on EAX to listen to Call of Duty 2, the clarity of the back speakers really gave me the shits. I don’t know whether my pair are dodgy, since I have asked 2 other owners of the same headset and they reckon the clarity is great, but honestly, my last headset was some shitty Dick Smith Electronics headset which costed around $20 actually was clearer. In all honest truth, the novelty of 5.1 in the headset wears off, and you end up with a great noise-cancelling but average noise-creating headset.

The bass of the headphones is quite good. Cranking some Pendulum gives you a nice bit of doof-doof, especially if you have a decent sound card with bass boost. The treble is not so good, it really isn’t clear enough and just makes dance songs sound more doof-doof than they really are.

Overall

A headset which is useful for sealing you from the rest of the world, but once there, gives you a pretty average auditory experience in 5.1. For $70, I guess you get what you paid for.

The good

• Great noise cancellation
• Thumping bass
• Nice, foldable design

The bad

• Treble is not pronounced enough
• Cord colour coding is wrong
• Clarity couldn’t match my bodgy $20 Dick Smith headset

The ugly

• No inline volume controls. The idiocy continues to amaze…

TURD SCORE: 40%

Higher percentages = worse product