CM Storm Ceres 400 PC Headset Review

While this maybe a headset aimed at the gaming market I generally always start out my tests with music. CM Storm say that this headset should provide high quality clear sound, so I opted to go straight for the hard stuff and see how well it handles a selection of demanding music.

The first thing I noticed was that even at maximum volume I wasn’t going completely deaf, there is definitely a limiter or something keeping things to a safe level, that’s not to say the headphones aren’t thumping loud, because they are, but not so loud that you can hurt your ears, this is a good thing of course. The pro side to this I found was the even at maximum volume the sound didn’t distort even the slightest and it was only after pushing my equalizers 180Hz to max and bottoming out the rest of the range that I noticed any break up in the audio, this is of course way of the range you would ever require you EQ. The headset actually gives a really even sound with bass, mid and high tones feeling really well balanced for a headset in this price range and put simply, music sounded a lot better than I would have expected from the 40mm drivers.

Gaming performance was just as good as the music, I find a lot of headsets can get really muddy sound when it comes to games like Battlefield 3 and F1 2012, the extreme mix of high and low frequencies tends to distort, but that wasn’t the case here. Even with a few people on voice chat while gaming I never ran into anything bad to say about the audio quality.

The microphone quality isn’t earth shattering, but it’s certainly up to par for use on Skype or in game chat. Nothing remarkable about it’s performance, but there rarely is in terms of microphone performance on headsets.