“Your Ears Aren’t Round, So Why Should Your Headset Be?”
I think that slogan used by Corsair’s marketing team is what sums up the VOID RGB wireless headset so well. It’s a piece of kit that’s been carefully designed to be as comfortable as possible, while not compromising on features or being extremely expensive.
When we talk about sub-£100 headsets, there’s not very much you can point to in terms of having quality, comfort, and features. It’s a triangle of compromise, where if you choose one specific key-point to have in your headset, it’ll lack in another aspect. You really have to go over the £100 mark to start seeing your headset excelling in all three main aspects here.
I’ve been through all kinds of headsets, from Razer, Turtle Beach, Gioteck, and others. None have really impressed me, and I’ve never been willing to go over that £100 mark for a headset. For the average gamer or someone that just wants something to “sound good”, I think under £100 should be perfectly reasonable to expect good things.
The VOID RGB Wireless headset seems to go against the trend other headsets operate by: no part of the quality seems to have been compromised in order to keep the price down. You have quality in the build: light materials are used but are still strong and doesn’t make the headset feel flimsy like so many others in this price category. You have comfort in those materials: the weight is kept down, the memory foam is excellent, and the shape of the earpieces are not perfectly round, but shaped in the same style as your ears to allow them to squeeze and cuddle the rims of your ears perfectly. Finally, it has plenty of features, even going so far as to include a Dolby sound mode alongside 7.1 emulated surround sound. It’s not true native 7.1, but it’s damn close in most situations.
By downloading Corsair’s control panel (the one used for tweaking their gaming mice and keyboards), you can mess around with the usual settings like the RGB lighting settings, equaliser, and load/save profiles for the headset. You can also choose to enable the Dolby mode emulate 7.1 surround sound, and it has mixed results. With Bass Boost and a few other settings tweaked, I found the headset to be very good while gaming and listening to music. Playing Final Fantasy XIV however, I noticed my mount’s footsteps went from being a crisp sound on the grass to being a reverberated and echoed slosh of sounds. A 0.5 second audio clip was Frankenstein-ed into a completely different audio effect that didn’t resemble the original audio used for horse hooves.
This is where audiophiles and creative professionals will likely jump off – or at least turn the Dolby feature off, which brings sounds back to a high quality. If you want to have a great audio experience that stays true and native to the original audio, you’ll need to turn Dolby off. As great as it sounds with most music and most games, there’s the occasional hiccup that causes some sound effects to stand out noticeably as being wrong/incorrect. Assuming you can get around that, in 90% of cases, the audio just sounds better or more rich.
How well does the surround sound work? Well I can’t pinpoint gunfire as quickly as I can in a cinema-like setup, but the VOID RGB wireless headset is great at making things sound like they’re coming from behind you, or to the side of you. Left and right is tremendously clear, and front and back is noticeable, just not quite so clear that I can feel it without having to concentrate.
I’ve used headsets before where the difference can be felt naturally/unconsciously so you can just react without having to think of which direction it came from. With the Corsair VOID RGB, I still have to listen out specifically for certain sounds, and it takes around 500ms to know where it’s coming from. 500ms might not sound like a lot, but if you’re getting shot at from behind, that instant recognition of bullet direction could save your life.
Still, for its price point, there’s little else that comes close to the Corsair VOID RGB wireless headset in terms of comfort, quality, and features. There have been a few reports of firmware problems and headsets not connecting properly, but I haven’t encountered anything like that in my usage. The only problem I’ve had is the dashboard application showing me I had 60% battery left on the headset, but having the headset beep multiple times to tell me it was dead and needed charging. I left it charge to 100% overnight, and I haven’t had the problem since.
The wireless range is also insane. I went from my gaming room upstairs down to the kitchen on the other side of the house, with a ceiling and two additional walls in the way, and I was still able to hear my audio perfectly. What other headset can boast that range?
All in all, the Corsair VOID RGB is a very good headset. If you’re looking for a high quality headset without going over £100 and wireless is an important feature, I’d seriously recommend you go and check out a Corsair VOID first.
The Corsair VOID RGB wireless headset is available from Amazon.
