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now to learn more. Welcome to my unboxing and overview of the Steel
Series 5HV3. So, as you may or may not have figured
out, the 5HV3 comes after the two and
before presumably the four because if Steeler is going to keep rolling the way
that they've been rolling for this last little while with more better audio
products all the time, we'll probably see a new revision at some point. But in
the meantime, this is what we've got, folks. So, packaging wise, it's pretty
straightforward. You take it out and then you have the headset sitting there.
Undo the little clips at the back.
That's hot. All twisted up in there. Get
that undone. Okay. Anyway, u So, what's different about the V3? Number one is
they have upgraded the drivers. So, the drivers, for those of you who are
uninitiated, are the speakers inside each of the ear cups. So, it should
offer better audio quality than the outgoing 5HV2. Now, around the outside of those
drivers, they've also upgraded the materials for the ear cups themselves.
So, instead of a cloth covering, they're now using a faux leather covering with
memory foam inside. So, hopefully you guys can get a pretty good idea of how
cushy those are. This does a couple of things. So, number one is it will make
them more comfortable. And number two is it actually improves the passive noise
isolation. So, there's no active noise cancelling or anything like that, but
there's less sound leaking in and leaking out of these compared to if they
were using a cloth covering for the ear
cups. Now, this is uh obviously optimal for something like a tournament
environment and the H series is their tournament grade headsets. Another thing
that's optimal for that if you travel around a lot is having it disassembled.
So, you can take it apart and chuck it in your bag. I suspect many people won't
use this feature even if they are traveling with it. But hey, it's there
so you can use it if you want. The contacts are very robust looking so you
can actually see how the wiring is done between the two ear cups. So, I wouldn't
worry about those wearing out over time.
All right, so let's move around to the left side here. Ah, yes. That right
there, a Steel Series staple, the infinitely poseable. See that? Look at
that. I love that. Put it wherever you want. The infinitely pososeable
retractable microphone. The actual reason I switched from my HD555s for
gaming to the Steel Series 7H's back when I got those a couple years ago. Um,
as with any Steeler headset, I would expect the microphone to be good
quality. Some gaming headsets have microphones, but they're terrible. I
have never yet had this experience with a Steel Series headset. The headphones
are of course adjustable, so you can go anywhere from sort of super tall cone
head guy setting, so right about, you know, there down to something that's
quite a bit too small for me. So, it kind of sits on the bottoms of my
earlobes. I wear a mediumsiz motorcycle helmet, so that should give you guys
some idea what's up. There's a little bit of rotation in the ear cups there,
but not a ton. I think uh for most people, that's really not going to be an
issue. But if your ears happen to sit very far back or very far forward, then
uh it's something to bear in mind. And then you've got about this much rotation
in them this way. So like vertical swiveing or whatever the case may be.
The cable's very nice. So they're using a double braided cable this time around.
And that might seem like it doesn't matter, but if you have cats, it might.
Or if you, you know, run over your cable with your mouse particularly vigorously.
No, that actually won't matter. But cats definitely if your cats try to chew
through this cable, they will have less success than a single braided or a
non-braided cable. And then that leads to the inline control, which hasn't been
changed since the last generation product. So it's basically got a
microphone mute or not mute as well as a
volume dial. Now, this goes all the way down to ah yes, now we're getting into
the Steel Series, the other Steel Series classic sort of flexibility thing that
they got going on. So right here is their swappable cable system. So you can
actually switch from the two connector,
so two three poles right there, to this
guy right here, a single four pole. So you can actually use the 5HV3 with a
mobile device or ultrabook or anything that only has a single audio jack for
both headphones and microphones. And then they've also got their included
extension cables. These are really handy. I don't even necessarily use them
on my headphones because I I usually have something in the front of my case
or something sitting on my desk, but these are just really handy if you need
like, you know, audio extension cables. So, I use them all the time. So, there
you go. You can either extend them or just use the nice short cable here and
terminate terminate terminate it in whatever type of ending you desire.
Thank you for checking out my unboxing and overview of the Steel Series 5HV3.
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