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by an unlocked Intel fourth gen core i7 or Core i5 processor and get a free copy of Rome 2 total war click now to learn more welcome to the first in a series of wireless gaming headset reviews we are actually gonna have the H wireless and the Vengeance 2100 coming soon but this my friends is the Astro a 50 gaming headset now I've been asked a lot of times to cover Astro products but as a member of the so called glorious PC gaming master race I actually thought that they were a small niche brand until I went to PAX Prime and they were absolutely everywhere I mean like everyone was using these headphones ok so i smartened up and promptly went to see astro asked them to hit me with their best shot so to speak and the guy pushed me whereupon I quickly clarified that I meant for him to send me a headset after the show and here we are one headset and once or gutt later now let's go ahead and open this baby up they actually sent over the a 50 wireless headset which is their a premium top-of-the-line headset and it happens to be the battlefield 4 Edition so it comes a little stuck don't return this to the store contact Astro for support as well as a QuickStart guide that you probably won't need that because it was pretty easy for me to set up anyway and then we also find the headset itself the mix amp TX which is their base station right here the wireless transmitter and then another piece of plastic let's remove their packaging is excellent really like this then underneath that we find an Xbox chat cable we find a USB charging cable as well as another USB charging cable this is cool because you can actually run one cable to the base station and then it has a pass-through for charging so the base station can actually sit on the is included headphone stand and then charge your headset from there so I'm just go ahead and pop that out and of course there's a spit F audio cable so it's an optical audio cable under there as well now construction and looks of the headset itself with some metal in the construction actually these posts right here and a softer foam than the Vengeance 2100 s that they nice soft cloth covering the material quality feels better than average especially for a gaming headset they are a little bit on the heavy side but that's probably the sturdy metal posts that are used for the size adjustments the ID of the industrial design I feel strikes a fantastic balance between gamer II looking and pro grade with a mostly black color scheme with a couple of tasteful orange accents I mean I don't know about you guys but I'd feel pretty silly spending three hundred dollars on something that looks like a toy for 12 year old so I think that this was a great way to go even though it is a you know bf4 edition like I don't mind getting a couple in-game items with my purchase and a bit of a different color scheme but I don't want game branding plastered all over it either like we've seen with some Logitech peripherals in the past in terms of general features they weigh in at 360 grams or so they are PC Mac Xbox Playstation phone AV system whatever compatible you can plug in anything with an optical out or an auxilary out into them as well as USB and it has they have an integrated non user replaceable battery which is comparable to the Vengeance 2100 s but I don't feel is as strong as SteelSeries this swappable battery system on the H wireless and I think that's pretty much it for my little feature list in terms of comfort they were not comfortable to me at first they have very little clamping pressure even out of the box so there's not really much break-in and I found them quite difficult to wear I found that they were like falling off my head until I tweaked the headband size a little bit tighter than I would normally like to do and then they were very solid now the a 50s headband gets away with the required tightness for a couple of reasons so number one is it has a very soft foam and number two even more importantly this flexible little piece right here it's really smart because even if your ears aren't quite aligned on your head like mine aren't you are able to clamp it a fair bit tighter and it adjusts to your head it's actually quite nice and now that I know how to use it properly I give them a definite you know gold star of appreciation for comfort the material on the ear cups doesn't really feel like anything chill on the ears but the foam inside is a nice medium softness feels like a memory foam nice low retraction so combined with the very very soft material here but I mean like I said it doesn't feel like leather or anything it just feels like a really nice soft material they are definitely good enough out of the box and should even break in even nicer in the long term they are noticeably heavier than the Vengeance 2100 s and the SteelSeries H Wireless but particularly compared to the 2100 s I find that because the weight is sitting in closer to your head I don't get as much a shake even when I move my head quite quickly now their website has some nonsense about wearing them around your neck or over your head but I just I gotta call them out on that because they're gonna slip right off of of me and I have a medium-sized head and they're basically like they're hanging off your ears at that point that's like saying you could wear your hoodie backwards you could but you won't alright let's move on to the range test for my range test I did five different locations I stayed within the same room so that's about 10 foot max I went down to the other side of the wall but still quite close I went down a hallway I went down to the stair landing which is like 15 feet away and the wall I went down to the bathroom downstairs and finally I went down to the basement with the base station itself installed in my office connected to my laptop so this was performed about the same as the Vengeance 2100 for our range test maximum volume of the Astra way 50s these can easily get uncomfortably loud there is no shortage of amplification going on here so unlike the H Wireless which actually didn't get like painfully loud for me these ones you can drive them as high as you want to go however unlike both the H Wireless and the Vengeance 2100 they don't seem to have any kind of limiter to prevent over driving the speakers and introducing Distortion the 850 s just let you go as high as you want even though it'll sound like completely like ass once you get to a certain level but don't worry about that guys the distortion doesn't come in until long after most people would be extremely uncomfortable in terms of noise isolation I'd say they're about average for a closed back headphone the cloth ear cut are going to resist a sweat more than something like a faux leather but what they also do is they leak sound more than a faux leather wood so you know whether you like isolation or whether you don't is up to you but I'd say they're about average for closed-back which is generally more isolation now let's move on to the listening tests all of these tests were performed using the onboard DAC so I wasn't actually using the analog in and a separate DAC this gives us the best apples to apples comparison for the way most people are gonna use these and we use them on a PC for sound quality I would say it is adequate it's really nothing special especially at three hundred dollars and especially compared to the better SteelSeries age wireless with that said while the usual synth at gaming headsets commit which is the overdone boomy bass at the expense of other parts of the listening experience isn't nearly as bad as some other game hit gaming headsets notably the razer kraken Forge which is also $300 there is definitely some looseness and Boo meanness to the bass and some details in the mids are lost even with the balanced EQ setting in fact to the point where the mids were kind of hard to evaluate there they're I mean they're good enough that I can hear everything clearly it's not like the dialogue in a movie or a male vocalist in a song is going to be completely impossible to hear but they are obscured somewhat by the lows highs on the other hand are clear which is expected you got to hear them footsteps if you're gonna market something as a gaming headset so the a 50s definitely don't disappoint there I guess that's most of what I have to say for for a list of subjective listening tests but I feel like it's important to mention that when we're comparing $300.00 wireless gaming headsets against what else you can buy for $300 we have to be fair so I could say yeah for $200 you could get wired audiophile grade headphones that'll blow the doors off of these are really the other ones in this roundup as well but it's because I don't really have any experience with audiophile grade wireless headphones I can't really speak to whether they're a great value against $300 audiophile wireless headphones so all I can really do is compare these three against each other talk about it that way so first up for double the price of a Corsair Vengeance 2100 you're getting more bass certainly you are missing out on some of the details in the mids but you are also getting the included stand you are getting varied configurable inputs and you're getting console compatibility which is sort of a big deal the 2100 is PC only oh well Mac only as well but you have to have a USB port that like you know drivers and stuff you're also getting more premium feeling materials compared to the 2100 and you're getting the handy dandy controls on the right ear cup that let you change your EQ profiles so there's three different presets you can adjust the mix between chat volume and game volume on the fly just by pressing these buttons right here that's a very nifty little feature and but you are paying twice as much for it compared to the SteelSeries age Wireless which costs the same you are getting much stronger like more sound in that very low frequency range but other than that they are quite feature comparable and the H Wireless is do sound are well rounded leave overall better I mean for me personally that trade-off of more Rumble is not worth it but if you want your ears to tickle and you want to feel it when an explosion goes off then I guess these would be the ones to do it for you the last thing this is this is something I'll let you guys kind of listen to for a moment this is my microphone test with the Astro a-50 wireless microphone I hope you guys enjoyed it so that was my microphone test I don't think I have to tell you how good the microphone is on the a 50 s I consider it to be a courtesy thing to have a microphone that is not offensive for your teammates to listen to and this one really doesn't qualify for me I mean data compression in online chat applications will level the playing field a little bit because even a good source won't sound that great but starting with a better source does still help a lot and these are by far the worst performing microphone in the round I also don't really like boom mic mics compared to retractable ones the ideal position for a headset microphone is in the corner of your mouth and I find that but you know what the boom mic it's like other you know what do I do I bend it here first so that I can try and get it in the right spot I find them hard to adjust to get in exactly the right spot so they end up in front of your mouth a lot the position lock see you can see it actually locks into position and the automatic mute that goes along with this boom mic though is actually not not a terrible implementation so I think that's pretty much it for the astroid 50s like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment and let me know who you think is going to be the big winner of this roundup I think I've probably given a fair number of hints already but regardless let me know what you think and as always guys don't forget to subscribe - tech 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