Call of Duty 4, Search and Destroy. Yeah, that is how the ‘pros’ play. As soon as I entered the game you could hear the difference, I could hear team mates stepping in water a fair distance away from me, and thanks to my new sense of hearing, enemies clunking across the map were not hard to notice. Sennheiser reckons that these new premium cans are the daddy for gamers, not only because of their downy-soft pads (got to keep those ears comfy during an all-night session) but because their superior audio is just the thing for hunting down the enemy.
I turned round before he could even reach me and introduced him to my AK, something I was not able to do on previous occasions due to restricted hearing. Sennheiser calls this method of hearing Binaural Perception. We call it knowing which direction a sound came from. Either way, the people at Sennheiser claim these 'phones will gain you valuable microseconds of reaction time‘. In this case it did, the Marine must have been baffled and it left me full of joy for 10 seconds, which by this time I then got sniped. =(
Right. Prepare for a trip to superlative city, where there's a bargain sale on "excellent", "fantastic" and "amazing". The sound these little fellows produce is all three of these rolled into one and then seasoned with a little more "superb". Playing games with these headphones, we noticed little nuances of noise that we'd never heard before.
In Race 07, the sound of pit mechanics tinkering in the background was bursting with detail - spanners turning, pit crew members mumbling, the lot. The bike on RedLynx Trials 2 sounded brutally raw. Guns in Half Life 2 were meaty and chunky, and the echo effects indoors were highly realistic.
The all-round clarity delivered was quite astonishing, and then same was true when listening to music. If there's one slight downside, it's that the musical performance with heavier rock tracks lacked just a touch of bass oomph. But we must stress this is a very slight nit-pick; we're not talking holes in the sound or anything like that.
If you're after the best gaming headset that money can buy - that we've ever used, at any rate - here it is. The PC 350 boasts superb clarity of sound, snazzy aesthetics, a top quality build and an excellent mic.
If there were any lingering doubts about the "value" of the PC 350s, these are quickly extinguished when you start playing games. For starters, the microphone is simply superb. No echo, no feedback, just clean and clear audio with noise cancelling ensuring that no background noise (i.e. TVs, phones, screaming children) interferes. It makes communicating with allies and enemies alike completely painless.
And since we're on the topic of enemies, the PC350s provide just about the best audio placement and spatial awareness we've experienced. This is demonstrated very well by how much easier it is to detect Spies in Team Fortress 2 using the PC 350s, as opposed to the P166s. If one de-cloaks nearby you'll be instantly alerted, as you will if he swings his knife in your vicinity - particularly useful when playing the Sniper or Engineer classes. This applies equally to all situations and with the PC 350s you'll always quickly identify where danger is coming from, though the response is still up to you!
