It's here. The headset you guys have been asking us to cover for months at this point.
The Odyssey Maxwell's. And we got them in the ultra-violent 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 plainer magnetic headphones.
Typically, headphones are dynamic 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 plainer 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 headband is this really cool electroplated metal that allows for this purple and
green kind of gradient. It 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.
Oh, a sticker. We have a USB-C cable of a length that I will not guess at. We also have a USB-A
to USB-C adapter, which is great because the dongle is USB-C, and a shorter 3.5 millimeter
TRRS connector, which is awesome. That means you can connect via 2.4 gigahertz, Bluetooth,
3.5 millimeter jack, or USB-C. Funny enough, if you are a PlayStation user, you can actually
still use these with your PlayStation 4 or 5 using the 3.5 millimeter 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 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 hypercardioid microphone. Oh, cool. And they have this Odyssey styling that matches some of
their higher end headphones. We have a USB type C, our 3.5 millimeter 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. Double press for side
tone on and off. 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 say 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 beamforming 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. You can just use the
headphones themselves. I love this. I love this so much because that just makes these so versatile.
This could be like 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 note 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. These are pretty heavy, 490 grams. 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 headband's 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 millimeter 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, they 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 Odyssey 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 Odyssey has been doing a pretty good job so far of addressing those issues and sending
it lots of firmware updates and patches for these headphones. Before we get listening to stuff,
I always 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, bass 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 just Bluetooth alone. Audio impressions wise,
this thing is pretty neutral, 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 bass region, it's so punchy, it's still fun, but it's not overwhelming or
bloating or ruining the mids. If anything, I'd call this 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 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 three to five DB increase only in the treble region,
like right up here with the presence and the lower end of the brilliant section is great.
It's subtle, it's noticeable, but subtle. The bass boost is like our original curve, but with
like three extra DB in the sub bass and very low bass regions, which is great. It doesn't get
boomy and bloated like some bass curves that will apply at like 200 Hertz. The immersive mode makes a
V shaped curve. We see the boost in the bass 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 treble boost,
especially up around this three kilohertz region. And we see a big decrease in the bass region.
This makes sense because the idea of a competition headphone is that you want to hear a lot of
details, maybe call us from enemies or other details like rustling bushes or just the voices of your
teammate. This allows you to lower that bass so that when say like boomy explosions happen,
you're not losing important information in the name of feeling immersed. And then we have footsteps,
which is like an even more exaggerated version of that three kilohertz 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 Hertz 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 at the bass region, which is
kind of making things boomy. And then there's like an under emphasis from like one kilohertz to eight
kilohertz, which makes the voice sound a little failed. And then there's that big dip above eight
kilohertz 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 have the
integrated microphone curve, you can see it also looks kind of weird. 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 microphone to be good because
clear comms are important. This is noise suppression on.
This is listening with noise suppression off. Just going to talk a little bit.
Have a little chat. Noise suppression low. We're still listening to grab 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 spy and I'm blaming the headset.
You know, they're pretty good. Obviously, as a closeback headphone, they're not going to be the most positional as say an open back, just because the soundstage 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 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 compared to like other gaming headsets that are high in like the Arktis 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 at like a planar magnetic headphone, the Moondrop Venus. They were pretty dang good.