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Logitech G633 Artemis Spectrum RGB Gaming Headset Review

2015-10-01
hey everyone I'm Steve from gamers Nexis dotnet and today we're looking at Logitech CG 6:33 gaming headset there are two versions of this headset the Artemus spectrum is the brand and then there's the G 633 and G 933 this is the 633 it is wired the G 933 is a wireless headset it's got some other features but all in all it's the same idea same base package just some interface changes so we're reviewing the G 633 here today we previously looked at both of these headsets in our tour to Logitech's audio engineering facility and you can see that content already live on the channel and on the website posted about a month ago now so that talks about the design and engineering process for the G 633 and for headsets in general but today we're reviewing it reviewing how it feels how it sounds things like that the big underline feature of the G 633 is its pro G driver which is a Logitech made driver it is 40 millimeters in diameter and the item that differentiates it here is the diaphragm so the diaphragm is the material covering the driver and it's the material through which the sound is transmitted that material impacts the audio quality it impacts the endurance of the driver so it's it's critical to get it correct and what Logitech's done is basically take a series of materials and and they've woven it into a mesh and that makes a thinner diaphragm more durable so you're getting the thinness desired to allow for greater sound quality but you're not theoretically not sacrificing endurance so that's the pro G driver we looked at it extensively in the previous post but that's what's in here you've got two drivers one per year in the G 633 and G 933 and then it uses Doby digital surround and DTS for simulation of more advanced surround sound setups the headset has four G keys on the left ear cup accompanied by a volume roller and a stowaway mic the mic automatically mutes when you push it up but the mic provides the user with an audible blip and a red LED change to can that it's muted speaking of LEDs the headset has RGB LED support for the usual millions of colors RGB LEDs can be cycled in various states so that's breathing or cycling colors or just solid and they're controlled through Logitech software which will call LGS Logitech Gaming software the cable is fully detachable and Logitech includes a micro USB to USB PC cable or a 3.5 millimeter cable for phones the headset has to be toggled for phone use the biggest item on the spec sheet here is probably DTS headphone X which is a technology made by the company DTS and Dolby Digital surround which is a perhaps more familiar name to those of you who have been to any sort of movie theater or something like that so both of these simulates surround in the headset it goes up to 7.1 channels and that helps you with positional audio so it's got front left and right speakers in the corners side speakers back left and right forward back things like that but first let's jump in three of you content with the comfort and then we'll go into gaming and music so those are our two main categories outside of comfort for headset reviews and for the G 633 Logitech's big marketing point that they told all of us reviewing the headset was they wanted to break away from the good for a gaming headset quote that a lot of their headsets are given in reviews so that means they're trying to be more versatile they're trying to be good at music movies and gaming and that's a big list of things to be good at especially in a field so competitive for comfort the headset uses relatively thick foam padding to give you a sort of distance to your drivers which is interesting and we'll talk about in the sound section and it uses the the thick padding that you find in a couple of other headsets so it is fairly comfortable once it's properly seated the material covering that foam can be a little bit itchy at times but it sort of works itself in and gets a bit more comfortable with age but it does generally take me a couple minutes at the beginning of every gaming session to sort of move it around and get over that initial feeling and speaking of moving it around the headset does have a tendency to slide back a little bit on me to the down where it's seated it's always either forward or back really sit perfectly still but again after maybe the first five minutes of the gaming session after I filled around with it enough it will mostly stay seated where I want it to and this I think is a reflection of the shape of the ear cups they're a little bit more rectangular and tall than some of the other headsets we've reviewed that stay seated a bit better and because of the sort of weight distribution of the headset that's why you get that sliding happening with the initial seat of the headset but once it's seated it's pretty good strictly in terms of fit I prefer the way the game comm 780 fits on my head a bit better and stay seated but there are vastly different headsets in terms of price point aesthetics this is a lot more advanced aesthetically and sound output so it's not a linear comparison in terms of products to buy but in terms of products that I like the feel of the game comm does get my vote for better comfort here the foam pads that ship with the headset by default are more of a mesh but you can get a leatherette foam pad coming in the future and that will prevent provide better sound isolation so anyone who's traveling will get a benefit from that if you're on a plane or something like that but it ships with these and they are pretty easy to take off the other item to note here speaking of customization is the side plates of the headset you can actually in theory in the future get a template for this and then 3d print your own design so if you want to get rid of that logo or put your own logo on it or change how it looks you should be able to do that in the future that's not live yet but it is in Logitech's plans Logitech G 633 has enough power to be dangerous when it comes to gaming and by this I mean that the headset is capable of producing tremendously immersive audio but it requires a bit of an informed user LGS the software could probably use better information conveyance in this regard especially pertaining to the multiple DTS and EQ settings better telling the user why they are there and what they do and in scenarios those settings generally make the best sense as far as the 3d setups DTS headphone acts proves itself in games which better simulate a studio so this would include cockpit based racing games or space sim games dirt rally and star citizen are excellent examples of both of these in dirt rally you can hear the gravel kicking up into the underside of the car really well and the audio positioning changes as the camera moves about the car which is something that code masters have done of course but Logitech's headset works with it very well with the camera on the hood and lower to the ground the gravel is louder and grittier and the engine noise is more roaring but as we move into the cockpit more of the exhaust cans rattling can be heard and you get sort of a Doppler effect as other cars pass you by on the track which is definitely cool to hear and of course you hear this on any stereo headset but it's amplified with DTS because it is tuning more specifically to bring out those sounds and give them more of a distinct pop an example of a suboptimal use case for DTS and OB would be counter-strike go so using DTS headphone X or doe B in csgo we're actually detrimental to my gameplay ability I was worse at pinpointing audio locations and a lot of that is because the headphones with DTS and/or Doby enabled will bring out a lot more of the environmental ambient noise when you're playing and you don't want those things in cs:go all you want is the most immediate threat you want to be able to locate that threat you want to hear the footsteps or the gunshot and you don't want anything else so Adobe and DTS will bring out for example the footsteps of your teammates behind you or the noises of the things behind you and csgo is a very linear chokepoint styled game where you sort of know where all the sounds should be you know what time they should be there and you know what you're looking for with a game like Halo or Call of Duty these technologies are actually useful and a lot of the professional teams will use Dobby surround and Halo or Cod gaming at tournaments and that's because those games are more circular so the Maps moves with gameplay it's a bit more alive in that nature my quality is pretty mediocre on the G 633 I was definitely a bit let down by it especially given the price point and the high-end engineering approach its vastly superior to hyper X's cloud mic quality but it falls desperately short of what even the Plantronics game comm is able to produce we've yet to find a quote-unquote gaming headset that exceeds Plantronics mic quality in the sub $100 150 dollar price range and that's because the game comm produces an output that's closer to the real voice of the user whereas this Logitech G 633 mic remove some of the natural resonance of a voice and it's attempt at isolating input and I think that damages quality overall you lose a lot of the users character when they're speaking into it put together a quick clip comparing my $400 professional input set up for field reporting which is a sin highs around the 46 reporter mic or something and a roland ro5 recorder and that's compared against the Plantronics game comm 788 which is a 50 to $80 headset the Logitech G 630 $350 headset and the HyperX cloud which is 70 to $100 today on which option you buy so have a listen to that hey everyone this is Steve from gamers Nexus dotnet and I am presently demonstrating the microphone quality of a professional reporter Mike hey Ron this is Steve from gamers Nexus dotnet and I am presently demonstrating the output audio quality of the Plantronics game comm 788 headset hey everyone this is Steve from gamers Nexus Donna and I am presently demonstrating the microphone quality of the Logitech G 633 gaming headset hey everyone this is steve from gamers nexus donna and i am presently demonstrating the output audio quality of the kingston hyperx cloud 2 gaming headset talking about portability the headsets not super well-suited for travel the profile is a bit larger than more travel friendly same cost audio solutions but with some of those solutions like the audio technica stop you do lose the microphone so that's sort of where you have to make it this if you're more concerned about portability and form factor than feature set I would still recommend the HyperX cloud 2 as my go-to travel option it's fairly affordable and it isolates the user substantially better for air travel so if this is something you want to take on a plane and listen to your phone and then maybe plug in a mic on the other side to talk to your friends or whatever then I would look at the cloud talking about music dobe and DTS are hit and miss it depends on what type of music you're listening to how it's encoded how well that encoding works with DTS if you're trying to use DTS so looking at that there's a lot of different items to take into account I blind tested myself here which I actually did for gaming as well I found that DTS headphone acts did well for some types of music like Dream Theater I have a 5.1 mixed Dream Theater album it's very progressive instrumentation and the native sound mixing coupled pretty well with DTS so I did like it there and preferred it over both Dobby and having them both off for bands like AFI which is a lot more simple than Dream Theater's music less complex music I found that DTS diminished the volume and grit and vocals which is something that you care about more in certain types of punk or rock and they felt like they have less character to them it's really hard to explain without just putting the headset on you but it sounds like there's almost a little more tin to the voice I don't want to use that word necessarily but that's that's sort of the direction it's going when I'm talking about that even though I'm saying I wouldn't want to use DTS or Adobe necessarily for certain bands certain types of music that doesn't mean the headsets bad it just means you turn those technologies off the headset still produces a very good noise it's got EQ options if you want more bass or if you want more travel and it produces a solid noise for sure when you're listening but you can just toggle those options off if you don't want them so concluding everything everyone pretty much knows that the audio industry is shrouded in all kinds of marketing BS there's thousand-dollar cables that perform the same as much cheaper counterparts there's all this marketing terminology that's confusing at best and misleading at worst so it's it's a tough industry to work and when we're reviewing the headsets we have to take all the marketing into account and look at does it perform what it's actually said it will do and does it do it well in the case of the G 633 I think it does do most of what it says pretty well the DTS support as I've said in a few times and I was good when it's good and when it's bad II just turn it off and the headset has great native audio performance so it's not a huge loss the build quality is pretty good it feels fairly solid you can flex it a bit as I'll show you here it's got some good flex it's not gonna just snap if you bend it like that so that does make it kind of okay for travel but the one downside here is its profile is pretty large so that's a lot of space to take up and some travel kits but it does have the strength that you need if you're gonna throw it around a bit the headset feels a bit lightweight because it uses a lightweight construction so if you want something heavier then that's potentially not the thing for you the ear cuffs are fairly meaty when it comes to the overall feel they're big but they're not necessarily heavy and one interesting thing to note is that because of the extra width here as you can see on the side of the headset it's pretty wide and because of that extra width the drivers are spaced a tiny bit more away from your ear than in some other headsets and I actually like that I feel like it's less hitting me on the sides of the head so it gives you some more depth of audio obviously some travels really fast so are you gonna notice a millimeter two millimetres of difference probably not but in terms of the sound actually having some spacing from your ear it does feel a little bit less claustrophobic with the G 633 which I like I've never really liked Doby digital surround in any environment any headset I didn't like them a 787 88 I don't like it here but that's me I know that pro gamers will use it and Xbox and Playstation gaming not something I do but I know that they use it and Halo and games like that so there's obviously a market for it I'm not a big fan just put that out there but DTS is executing pretty well it's slacking in some games it needs to certainly have audio that's encoded for it audio that's compatible with it game design that works with it so sort of try it out if you buy the headset just toggle it see if you like it if you turn it off the headset offers a powerful audio experience by default without surround tech and works well for music and gaming almost equally the EQ tuning is welcomed and well executed you've got control over advanced settings for different frequency ranges you can tune those comfort needs a lot of work on the G 633 it's not terrible but it's a little bit annoying the way it slides back on your head as you use it a bit and I did test this on multiple people it's just not my hair something like that adding 2 inches to circumference but I did test it with a couple of other people and we all had this problem where it sort of slides back over time it's definitely annoying but as I said throughout game and you kind of fidget with it keep moving it couple millimeters or happen inch and it eventually finds a seat and stays there for the most part there's a lot of competition at this price point but not a lot of good competition at this price point so to give everyone an idea of the environments for headsets right now the Siberia v3 is priced pretty similarly certainly look into that it's got the LEDs if you like LEDs Corsair it has its new void headset also an RGB LED headset and that one's supposed to be pretty good I haven't really used it enough to review it yet but we're getting one soon and we'll talk about it then Corsair void look into that other headsets would include the HyperX cloud 2 that's a bit cheaper it's closer to the hundred dollar price point but if you're trending that direction it's worth looking at it's mic quality isn't great though it's worse than this so that's a downside of the cloud the game comm 788 I keep saying it but it is my favorite sub $100 headset so if you're trying to spend less than 100 bucks go grab that other than this steel series 9h is also worth looking at the 9h the Siberia and the corsair void would be my main items that I look at when comparing against the G 633 so check out reviews for all those headsets look at the pricing and see what you like best and if you have any questions let me know in the comments below I'll do my best to answer it either in the comments or in our next ask of GN episode as you know we do those now and that's all for this review check out the article for more details how it was designed things like that my opinions and hit that patreon link in the post roll video if you like this content because it helps us a lot when we get direct support so that's all for this time I'll see you all next time
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