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The bulk of my Xbox 360 time is spent playing multiplayer on Xbox Live. One of the main features of the service is the ability to communicate with other players via voice chat. This is accomplished with a headset that plugs into the controller. The stock headset that comes with the high-end 360 is adequate, but not an overly impressive piece of hardware. Plus, it amuses the hell out of certain people in my life who refer to it as my "dorky headset."
In an effort to upgrade the cool factor of my gaming accessories and to get a higher-end headset for those gaming sessions lasting into the wee hours of the night, I picked up the new GameCom X30 headset by Plantronics. They make good headsets for cell phones and PC gaming, plus it looked cool; I just went out and bought one without reading a review.
In short, I'm not disappointed, but I'm really not impressed either.
First, putting on a headset might not be exactly rocket science, but since it's an in-ear model with a rubber support piece underneath, a little more instruction on adjusting and fine-tuning for comfort -- not just the drawn person on the back of the package might have been a little more helpful.
Second, it suffers from the same flaw as the standard Xbox 360 headset: no easy way to see if you're on mute or not. I play in a dark room with no light other than that coming from the TV and the mute indicator is just a painted on label to one side of the switch. To further complicate things, the volume and mute controls themselves are attached to the middle of the wire, so my controller thrashing can result in the mute controls facing any which way. The original Xbox Communicator was the best implementation: a bright red or green LED to show you if you were on mute with an easy to hit button next to it.
The volume knob is okay, but could have been made a bit easier to turn. Again this also suffers the same design issue from being on the wire. If the wire gets turned around, you may blow out an ear-drum instead of dialing down the lunatic rantings of some 14-year-old you just owned in "Battlefield 2".
Lastly, is just the bad, bad design of the clip to attach the volume/mute controls to your clothes. It's a clip shape like that on a pen, so unless you tend to game in a button-down shirt it's pretty useless. A gator clip that can easily grab onto a t-shirt would have been a much better implementation. This is also important because the weight of the controls swinging on the wire can tug your earpiece out of place when you wander into the kitchen for a between-match drink.
With all the negatives out of the way, the headset performs very well. Once I figured out how to wear it, it sat comfortably on my ear, and the audio was clearer than the stock headset. After a bit of mike fiddling, I got the boom mike pointed in good spot where teammates can easily hear me without being the guy in the match mouth breathing into the mike. I hate that guy.
Unless you have strong feelings against over-the-head headsets, the GameCom X30 is probably not worth the $30 bucks as a replacement. If you're someone with a core 360 and are now in need a headset for getting online, this one is a viable option to the Microsoft one for $10 less.
Reposted from Culture Captioning.
