First off, I have to acknowledge that R2800 is a substantial amount of money for a pair of headphones. However, if you’re like me, you demand the best from your audio hardware – and not just for gaming. Sennheiser have a very good reputation in the audio industry, and the headset sub-industry in particular and these headphones definitely do not disappoint.
The headphones themselves come with the standard 3.5mm jacks for the headphones and microphone. The cable from the headphones themselves only leads into the one earpiece, so no more cable tangling! Unfortunately, the cord isn’t connected to the earpiece by a jack (unlike some of the other Sennheiser headphones), so replacing the cable if it breaks won’t be that simple. Unfortunately, the rather lengthy cable (3m) doesn’t have any form of cable management supplied, so you will have to find some way to manage it manually. The cable does, however, have a volume control and a microphone control approximately one meter from the headphones themselves.
So, onto the most important part of the review – how the ‘phones actually sound. I fired up Winamp to listen to some music. First up was O Fortuna by Carl Orff. The Sennheiser’s reproduced the song superbly. The high notes of the choir’s voices are crisp, the midrange in the orchestra is rich and clear and the bass of the kettle drums is sharp – although the amount of bass produced by the headphones might not be enough out of the box, I had to adjust it in the windows settings.
Off the classical stuff, I fired up some Disturbed – Down With The Sickness. Again, the same qualities were exhibited by the ‘phones throughout the whole range. The sound was crisp, but without being too hard (such as the Steelseries 5H v2’s might have sounded in a similar situation). The bass was good and crisp and the midrange was rich.
Wanting to test the bass a bit more extensively, I fired up Pendulum – Fasten Your Seatbelt. The bass, once you adjust the levels in windows, is definitely sufficient and far superior to that produced by my HD 437s in terms of clarity.
From there, I loaded Casino Royale to see how PC-350s performed with a movie. Again, no surprises, the PC-350s are really awesome, reproducing the sound perfectly. Surround sound, such as provided by the Logitech Z-5500s, is still preferable for movie watching though.
Now onto the most important aspect – the gaming. This is after all what the PC-350s claim as their main selling point. Being a CoD4 addict, I joined one of the maxi servers on overgrown (game type was sabotage). The first thing I noticed was the sheer clarity of the sound. When I got a moment of silence from all the random gunfire, I found I could hear people’s footsteps far more easily than ever before, helped no doubt by being isolated from other sound in my house and room, the passive attenuation of these headphones is very good. I suspect that to get better attenuation you’d have to spend money on headphones with active sound attenuation. Although being able to hear footsteps clearly is a definite advantage, these headphones have such a good sound-stage – the sense of width, depth and height when listening to audio – that you can place exactly where the footsteps are relative to yourself. This is a vast improvement over the HD 437s, where I had almost no idea where the sound was coming from, short of which side of the map it was on. When it got to sudden death though, these headphones really came into their own, as a result of the sudden quiet on the map. It’s so easy to pick up footsteps and other important sounds while wearing these ‘phones.
Now while it is all fine and well to try the headphones on an open server, they’re really intended for competitive players. And in the competitive version of CoD4, these headphones are honestly superior to every other set I’ve ever tried. The sound placement is so precise and exact that I’m often reacting to an enemy about to appear around a far corner before they have even stepped around it. Not only is the horizontal and lateral placement perfect, but the Sennheisers actually allow for a degree of vertical placement of sounds, which is something very unusual in stereo headsets.
In terms of the microphone, I’m told it’s far clearer than the one I used previously (a clip on one) and I must admit, it’s very nice having a mic attached to my ‘phones for a change. The microphone itself has another microphone pointing away from the user. This gathers sounds intruding upon the user (such as a dog barking, for instance), analyses the sound in real-time and plays back an exact opposite of the sound (or frequency) if you are speaking, thus cancelling the errant sound. This is known as noise cancelling. It works like a charm on the Sennheisers according to those who have heard me talking over VOIP in a noisy environment.
In conclusion, these are a fantastic set of headphones. If you are an audiophile and gamer like myself, you’ll definitely appreciate what these headphones are capable of. They produce clean and crisp sound throughout the entire audio spectrum. They definitely make a huge difference in-game (even if you do have 5.1 speakers) and it’s far easier to perceive where sounds are relative to your position (for the technically minded, it’s referred to as binaural perception). However, they’re definitely not for everyone, thanks in large part to the price-tag. I guess most people won’t be able to justify the price difference between these and something like the Razer 7.1, for instance. In addition to that, you also need a discrete soundcard to get the most out of these headphones. Onboard audio is simply not good enough to do them justice.