it's here the headset you guys have been asking us to cover for months at this
point the Odyssey Maxwells and we got
them in the ultraviolet variant if you've been looking for a gaming headset
you've probably heard a lot of hype about these These are kind of supposed
to be the best of the best in terms of gaming headsets right now which is why
I'm so very excited to look at them for those of you who aren't familiar with
the company Odyssey they're a high-end headphone manufacturer who focuses on
planer magnetic headphones typically headphones are Dynamic d driver
headphones which means they have a speaker and a coil and they look kind of like a tiny version of the speakers
you'd see on say your desk or something a planer magnetic headphone however has
a thin membrane with a wire embedded into it that's suspended between two
magnets to vibrate back and forth to create the sound Odyssey has a high-end
history but they're making quite a mainstream product as we've heard it's
made a splash and wow these are loud I
can talk to the top camera now you know I kind of like the colorway I don't know
if I would wear it out of the house oh and the head band is this really cool
electroplated metal that allows for this purple and green kind of gradient that
looks significantly nicer than the kind of cheap plastic color on these sides of
here we're specifically looking at the Xbox versions of these today which is
why we have a little USB dongle that can switch between Xbox and PC and I don't
think there's any difference between this or the PlayStation 5 model other
than support for Sony's Tempest audio versus support for a Dolby Atmos
license ooh a sticker we have a USBC
cable of a length that I will not guess at we also have a USB a USBC adapter
which is great because the dongle USBC and a shorter 3.5 mm TRS connector which
is awesome that means you can connect via 2.4 GHz Bluetooth 32 mm Jack or USBC
funny enough if you are a PlayStation user you can actually still use these
with your PlayStation 4 or 5 using the 3.5 mm Jack on your controller but
apparently some functionality might not work and odyssey doesn't recommend it
let's make our way around the headphones shall we on the right side we have a hole presumably for a microphone and on
the left hand side we have all of our controls we got a chat mute switch a
power button we have a indicator led a
noise suppression low a noise suppression button not to be confused
with active noise cancellation these don't have any of that this is noise suppression for your microphone an input
for the boom mic which is sufficiently bendy and a hyper cardioid microphone oh
cool and they have this odsy styling that matches some of their higher-end headphones uh we have a USB type-c our
3.5 mm adapter we have two knobs one for
game and chat audio so probably the
adjusting how much audio is your game and how much is the side tone and then a
volume rocker these are also buttons
sideone double press for side tone on and off sideone on EQ oh you can adjust
the EQ the power button also functions as a multi-use button so you can like play
pause with single press you can start pairing with two presses if it's not paired to anything else now I did see
that there was a microphone on this side but there's a boom mic so what's the
deal well inside the headphones themselves we also have four beam
forming microphones on top of having a boom microphone so if you want to take
these on the bus use them as just a normal Wireless pair of headphones you don't want this boom in Your Vision or
something like that you don't even need it uh you can just use the headphones
themselves I love this I love this so much cuz that just makes these so
versatile this could be like the the only pair of headphones you really really need especially considering that
these have 80 hours of battery life
which is crazy two full work weeks of listening that's tons the ear cups are
nicely labeled with left and right I thought these were stickers but they're
actually just printed on really nicely the ear cups are
removable and we can kind of get a peek at how the drivers look that's kind of
neat the ear cups themselves are made of a plastic leather and are filled with a very plush and soft kind of memory foam
material I found them to be rather comfortable but maybe a little bit
shallow for some people if you have ears that stick out a little bit more and one
thing to not is that I don't know what it is about certain types of plastic
leather but I got like irritation on my ears like I have like a rash on my ears
now from this it's not unique to these headphones I've had this before with
other ones but maybe if you have sensitive skin it's something to note
luckily they're easy to replace assuming you go to a third party because Odyssey
doesn't sell replacement pads for the Maxwell yet but you can get replacement
ear cushions from Wicked cushions who's the sponsor of today's video thanks to
Wicked cushions for sponsoring today's video are your old worn out headphones
that need to some TLC or maybe you just want to spruce up your new headphones
either way look no further than Wicked cushions Wicked cushions makes top
quality headphone cushions that are designed to provide you with an impeccable comfort and sound quality
they even make cushions with cooling gel in them to keep your ears sweat free
Wicked cushion supports a wide variety of headphones so make sure to check them
out at the links down below these are pretty heavy 490 G so I wouldn't really
use these for say I don't know physical activity they're well built in my
opinion I think the headbands pretty sturdy this whole mechanism for the ear
cup is like really good and stable I'd say the plastic is a little bit
plasticky and as we can see just from the little bit of use we've had there's
already kind of scratches on these which is a bit of a bummer that's kind of just
the downside of choosing such a reflective and shiny plastic I still feel like these are going to last quite
a long time and they feel pretty stable on the head I find that they don't clamp
too tight I don't find that a heavy headphone really bothers me with
simultaneous audio you can listen to something through Bluetooth and through your 3.5 mm Jack or your USB at the same
time which is kind of weird I don't know of many headphones that can do that so
that's kind of a neat little trick also these support Bluetooth 5.3 which is
awesome for a few reasons one because in the future more devices will support it
but two it's going to support the new Bluetooth audio codec lc3 plus which
will bring higher quality audio to your headphones and from your headphones to
your device you also get really strong multi-point connection so you can do
really easy handoffs between devices which is great because the more options
the more better you don't need to have a device that supports Sony's ldac you can
use something that's going to be supported by any Bluetooth 5.3
device this is like something that I feel like I bring up in every video
where I go it sucks that this headphone can't connect this way and odsy was just
like yeah that does suck so we're going to make it so that you can connect in every way possible every codec every
input it's just going to work and I love that we're going to use their wireless
dongle which actually is able to provide the same level of audio quality as the
actual USB connection I like that it calls out very clearly what's happening
it just goes it just says USB dongle I like that one thing to note is that
these kind of launched in a bit of a buggy state but odsy been doing a pretty
good job so far of addressing those issues and sending out lots of firmware
updates and patches for these headphones before we get listening to stuff I also want to talk about the app real quick
there's an app for your phone and for the desktop the app looks so cheesy
but it's a really really good app it comes with six different pre-made eqs
for Odyssey treble boost Bas boost immersive competition footsteps and then
also you can make presets with a 10 band graphic EQ other than that the app is
useful for updating the firmware changing settings like your auto
shutdown timer the loudness of voice prompts you can set a volume limiter
it's got everything you need and nothing you don't it seems like the dongle and
the Bluetooth don't really mesh very well so if you want to do a lot of device switching maybe stick to using a
wire or to adjust Bluetooth alone audio
Impressions wise this thing is pretty neutral uh which is great it feels like
something that almost everybody's going to enjoy it's not super super sparkly or
really bright or shrill but it still maintains detail and in the base region
it's still Punchy it's still fun but it's not overwhelming or bloating or
ruining the mids if anything I'd call these like maybe a little mid treble forward which gives them like a lot of
energy but it might be a little overbearing for some people but like
it's just this is this has got to be a people pleaser these are just going to sound good to most people and that's
awesome if these didn't have all of the gaming features and were just a wired
pair of headphones with this audio quality the price wouldn't be crazy but
that's just what I think let's talk about some measurements looking at our frequency response curve compared to our
Target that's the dotted white line the green line which is the Odyssey
Maxwell's they line up almost exactly our Target is supposed to represent what
about 65% of people in the world will find to be neutral and enjoyable Sam in
the lab actually went through and measured all of the different preset eqs
he was the one who really pointed out to me how tasteful they were so like the treble boost just see like a 3 to 5 DB
increase only in the treble region like right up here with the presence and the
lower end of the Brilliance section it's great it's subtle it's noticeable but
subtle the base boost is like our original curve but with like three extra
DB in the subbase and very low base regions which is great it doesn't get boomy and Bloated like some base curves
that will apply at like 200 htz the immersive mode makes a V shaped curve we
see the Boost in the base and in the treble the competition mode is
interesting this is where the gamer Focus comes in remember this is a gaming headset a lot of trouble boost
especially up around this 3 khz region and we see a big decrease in the base
region this makes sense because the idea of a competition headphone is that you
want to hear a lot of details maybe call outs from enemies or other details like
rustling bushes or just the voices of your teammate this allows you to lower
that base so that when say like boomy explosions happen you're not losing
important information in the name of ooh
uh feeling immersed and then we have footsteps which is like an even more
exaggerated version of that 3 khz bump that we saw in the competition mode
basically all it's doing is literally just boosting the parts of the footsteps
so like when you put your foot down it's kind of like heel toe so you have a little bit of a higher click as well as
more of a thud and that is bumped up right around here at 100 HZ and then
also bumped up in the upper mids and I tried it with some games and it works
really well they really thought these eqs through and I think that's pretty
dang cool if we look at isolation we can see that there's a lot of isolation for
the higher frequencies which is typical of a closed back headphone and not a lot
in the lower frequencies again typical usually you need active noise
cancellation to attenuate some of these lower frequencies and now we have mic
measurements this is through the boom mic and the mic at least what we
measured it is kind of disappointing but as you can see there's this huge
increase over the base region which is kind of making things boomy and then there's like an underemphasis from like
1 khz to 8 khz which makes the voice sound a little failed and then there's
that big dip above 8 khz that takes kind of the air out of the voice that can
maybe make it sound like lifeless and that reflects I think in the recording
quality of some of our samples you at the integrated microphone curve you can
see it also looks kind of weird uh the sound it's a bit different you'll have
to tell me what to think but the sibilance issues kind of remain I kind
of sound like Herbert from Family Guy with the like soft and subtle kind of
s's it's kind of disappointing I guess it's serviceable if you're just taking
like a phone call or something but I would not rely on this specifically for
communications which kind of indicates a pretty big weak point for this headset
especially for a gaming headset where you want your mic microphone to be good because clear comms are
important uh this is noise suppression on
set this is listening with noise suppression off just going to talk a
little bit AV a little chat noise suppression low we're still listening to
crab Rave and this is noise suppression high
so I tell does it sound better how well does it suppress the random noise that
is crab Rave but you know what's more important is if I get to have fun
playing games right now so I'm going to play some
games okay so I didn't I the footsteps don't work I got stabbed by a spy and
I'm blaming the headset you know they're pretty good obviously as a closed back
headphone they're not going to be the most positional as say an open back just
cuz the Sound Stage is naturally a little bit closed off but they do an
admirable job the footsteps sound profile I think actually does make a big
difference listen they're good at music
they're neutral they're going to be good at gaming too and the fact that you have
the ability to just kind of Tinker them
to your liking they're so malleable is just a bonus on top really the only
disappointment here is just the microphone that's as a package these are
excellent they sound great they're durable and the craziest thing is that
these are just $330 I know $330 that's
not cheap it ain't cheap at all but when you compare to like other gaming headsets that are highend like the arcst
Nova Pros I think these sound better they work with simpler and less
intrusive software they work with like everything you can listen to them how
you want I get the hype if you want
though you can get these for cheaper if you get the Sony ones they're only $300
there's a weird price discrepancy between the Xbox versions and the Sony versions just think about that before
you buy them because the Sony ones still work with your computer thanks for
watching ShortCircuit if you like this why don't you check out the last time I looked it like a planer magnetic
headphone the moon drop Venus they were pretty dang good