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rome 2 total war click now to learn more welcome to the first in a series of
wireless gaming headset reviews we are actually going to have the h wireless
and the vengeance 2100 coming soon but
this my friends is the astro a50 gaming headset now i've been asked a lot of
times to cover astro products but as a member of the
so-called glorious pc gaming master race i actually thought that they were a
small niche brand until i went to pax prime and they were absolutely
everywhere i mean like everyone was using these headphones and i was like
okay so i smartened up and promptly went to see astro and asked them to hit me
with their best shot so to speak and the guy punched me
uh whereupon i quickly clarified that i meant for him to send me a headset after
the show and here we are one headset and
one sore gut later now let's go ahead and open this baby up they actually sent
over the a50 wireless headset which is
their premium top of the line headset and it happens to be the battlefield 4
edition so it comes a little stop don't return this to the store contact astro
for support as well as a quick start guide but you probably won't need that
because it was pretty easy for me to set up anyway and then we also find the
headset itself the mix amp tx which is
their base station right here the wireless transmitter and then another
piece of plastic that's removed their packaging is excellent really like this
then underneath that we find an xbox chat cable we find a usb charging cable
as well as another usb charging cable this is cool because you can actually
run one cable to the base station and then it has a pass-through for charging
so the base station can actually sit on the is
included headphone stand and then charge your headset from there so i'm just
going to go ahead and pop that out and then of course there's a spitf audio
cable so that's an optical audio cable under there as well
now construction and looks of the headset itself with some metal in the
construction actually these posts right here and a softer foam than the
vengeance 2100s with a really nice soft cloth covering the
material quality feels better than average especially for a gaming headset
they are a little bit on the heavy side but that's probably the sturdy metal
posts that are used for the size adjustments the id the industrial design
i feel strikes a fantastic balance between gamery looking and pro grade with a
mostly black color scheme with a couple of tasteful orange accents i mean i
don't know about you guys but i'd feel pretty silly spending 300
on something that looks like a toy for 12 year olds so i think that this was a
great way to go even though it is a you know bf4 edition like i don't mind
getting a couple in-game items with my purchase and a bit of a different color
scheme but i don't want game branding plastered all over it either like we've
seen with some logitech peripherals in the past in terms of general features
they weigh in at 360 grams or so they
are pc mac xbox playstation phone av
system whatever compatible you can plug in anything with an optical out or an
auxiliary out into them as well as usb
it has they have an integrated non-user replaceable battery which is comparable
to the vengeance 2100s but i don't feel is as strong as steelseries's swappable
battery system on the h wireless and i
think that's pretty much it for my little feature list in terms of comfort
they were not comfortable to me at first
they have very little clamping pressure even out of the box so there's not
really much break-in and i found them quite difficult to wear um i found that
they were like falling off my head until i tweaked the headband size a little bit
tighter than i would normally like to do and then they were very solid now the
a50s headband gets away with the required tightness for a couple of
reasons so number one is it has a very soft foam and number two even more
importantly this flexible middle piece right here is really smart because even
if your ears aren't quite aligned on your head like mine aren't you are able
to clamp it a fair bit tighter and it adjusts to your head it's actually quite
nice and now that i know how to use it properly i give them a definite you know
gold star of appreciation for comfort the material on the ear cups um doesn't
really feel like anything special on the ears but the foam inside is a nice
medium softness feels like a memory foam nice slow retraction so combined with
the very very soft material here but i mean like i said it doesn't feel like
leather or anything it just feels like a really nice soft material they are
definitely good enough out of the box and should even break in even nicer in
the long term they are noticeably heavier than the vengeance 2100s and the
steelseries h wireless but particularly compared to the 2100s i find that
because the weight is sitting in closer to your head i don't get as much
shake even when i move my head quite quickly now their website has some
nonsense about wearing them around your neck or over your head but i just i
gotta call them out on that because they're gonna slip right off of of me they and i have a
medium-sized head and they're basically like they're hanging off your ears at
that point that's like saying you could wear your hoodie backwards
you could but you won't all right let's move on to the range test for my range
test i did five different locations i stayed within the same room so that's
about a ten foot max i went down to the other side of the wall but still quite
close i went down a hallway i went down to the stair landing which is uh like 15
feet away and a wall i went down to the bathroom downstairs and finally i went
down to the basement with the base station itself installed in my office
connected to my laptop so this was uh performed about the same as the
vengeance 2100 for our range test maximum volume of the astro a50s these
can easily get uncomfortably loud there
is no shortage of amplification going on here so unlike the h wireless which
actually didn't get like painfully loud for me uh these ones you can drive them
as high as you want to go however unlike both the h wireless and the vengeance
2100 they don't seem to have any kind of limiter to prevent overdriving the
speakers and introducing distortion the a50s just let you go as high as you want
even though it'll sound like completely like ass once you get to a certain level
but don't worry about that guys the distortion doesn't come in until long
after most people would be extremely uncomfortable in terms of noise
isolation i'd say they're about average for a closed back headphone the cloth
ear cups are going to resist a sweat more than
something like a faux leather but what they also do is they leak sound more
than a faux leather wood so you know whether you like isolation or whether
you don't is up to you but i'd say they're about average for closed back which is generally more isolation
now let's move on to the listening tests all of these tests were performed using
the onboard dac so i wasn't actually using the analog in in a separate dac
this gives us the best apples to apples comparison for the way most people are
going to use these and we use them on a pc for sound quality i would say it is
adequate it's really nothing special especially
at 300 and especially compared to the
better steel series h wireless um with that said while the usual sin that
gaming headsets commit which is the overdone boomy bass at the expense of
other parts of the listening experience isn't nearly as bad as some other game
gaming headsets notably the razer kraken forge which is also 300
there is definitely some looseness and boominess to the base and some details
in the mids are lost even with the balanced eq setting in fact to the point
where the mids were kind of hard to evaluate they're there i mean they're
good enough that i can hear everything clearly it's not like the dialogue in a
movie or a male vocalist in a song is going to be
completely impossible to hear but they are obscured somewhat by the lows highs
on the other hand are clear which is expected you got to hear dim footsteps
if you're going to market something as a gaming headset so the a50s definitely
don't disappoint there i guess that's most of what i have to say for for lis
subjective listening tests but i feel like it's important to mention that when
we're comparing 300 wireless gaming headsets against what
else you can buy for three hundred dollars we have to be fair so i i could
say yeah for two hundred dollars you could get uh wired audiophile grade
headphones that'll blow the doors off of these or really the other ones in this
roundup as well but it's because i don't really have any
experience with audiophile grade wireless headphones i can't really speak
to whether they're a great value against 300 audiophile wireless headphones so
all i can really do is compare these three against each other and talk about
it that way so first up for double the price of a Corsair vengeance 2100 you're
getting more bass certainly you are missing out on some of the details in
the mids but you are also getting the included stand you are getting varied
configurable inputs and you're getting console compatibility which is sort of a
big deal the 2100 is pc only oh well mac
only as well but you have to have a usb port that like you know drivers and stuff you're also getting more premium
feeling materials compared to the 2100s and you're getting the handy dandy
controls on the right ear cup that let you change your eq profiles so there's
three different presets you can adjust the mix between chat volume and game
volume on the fly just by pressing these buttons right here that's a very nifty
little feature and but you are paying twice as much for it
compared to the steel series h wireless which costs the same you're getting much
stronger like more sound in that very low frequency range
but other than that they are quite feature comparable and the h wirelesses
do sound uh well-roundedly overall better i mean for me personally that
trade-off of more rumble is not worth it but if you want your ears to tickle and
you want to feel it when an explosion goes off then i guess these would be the
ones to do it for you the last thing this is this is something
i'll let you guys kind of listen to for a moment this is my microphone test with
the astro a50 wireless microphone i hope
you guys enjoyed it so that was my microphone test um i
don't think i have to tell you how good the microphone is on the a50s i consider
it to be a courtesy thing to have a microphone that is not offensive for
your teammates to listen to and this one really doesn't qualify for me i mean
data compression in online chat applications will level the playing
field a little bit because even a good source won't sound that great but
starting with a better source does still help a lot and these were by far the
worst performing uh microphone in the roundup i also don't really like boom my
mics compared to retractable ones the ideal position for a headset microphone
is the corner of your mouth and i find that you know with a boom mic it's like either you know what do i do i bend it
here first so that i can try and get it in the right spot i find them hard to
adjust to get in exactly the right spot so they end up in front of your mouth a
lot uh the position lock see you can see it actually
locks into position and the automatic mute that goes along with this boom mic
though is actually um not not a terrible implementation
so i think that's pretty much it for the astro a50s like this video if you liked
it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment and let me know
who you think is going to be the big winner of this roundup i think i've probably given a fair number of hints
already but regardless let me know what you think and as always guys don't
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