Corsair HS60 HAPTIC Gaming Headset Review

A Closer Look & Performance

The first thing that stands out about this headset is the design, as it looks really cool. It comes with this matte finish camo, mixing a muted green, grey and black with an off white. However, it’s unique to this headset, as each headset will have some variance. I checked with Corsair if it’s hydro dipped, which I suspect it is, but they’re unable to confirm at this time. Either way, it looks epic!

The ear cups feature this 3D texture on the back, with a textured Corsair sails logo in the middle. It’s a closed-back design too, which is not surprising given the headset design is focused on low-end bass. Sealing up the ear cups helps tighten up the low-end response for a bigger bass sound, as it traps in the air pressure around your ears.

The headband mounts to the ear cups using a lightly textured steel arm, which has a dark titanium grey or gun metal look to it.

The ear cups are mounted to it with a small pivot on each side allowing for some range of movement. It’s more than enough to ensure a clean and balanced fit around your ears, regardless of your head size.

The ear cups can be rotated a few degrees inwards.

And also a few degrees outwards, it’s not much, but it’s enough to ensure a comfortable fit around your ears. Everyone has a slightly different head shape and size, so these small details do make a big difference to your comfort.

The headband is easily adjusted using the built-in sliders on either side. It’s a fully metal interior on the headband too, so it’s pretty tough and I like that it has a well-defined notch on each adjustment, as it locks the headset size quite nicely and doesn’t slip.

The headband is very well padded and comes with the same diamond stitch design we’ve seen on previous HS-series headsets from Corsair. I can see this headset will have obvious appeal to gamers, but it’s also just a gorgeous product overall, and using if for those work Skype/Zoom calls won’t make you look a fool, that’s for sure.

Overall though, it’s a very comfortable headband, and those little details go a long way to improving the aesthetics.

The ear cups are a PSU leather and even on those, the extra stitching looks superb, with it slightly to the outside edge, so that it doesn’t rub on your ears, giving you a large memory foam pad to rest around your ears.

It’s very forgiving too, and while the headset has a firm clamping force around your ears, it distributes its own weight very well and it is as comfortable as you would hope a premium headset from a premium brand to be!

The most important aspects of this headset, however, are how it sounds. I already know the HS60 is a great headset, I’ve reviewed every variant of it over the years. It’s based on the HS60 Pro I reviewed 9 months ago and I loved that headset. So take an already amazing sounding headset, and cram in some low frequency haptic drivers and what do you get? A headset that packs what I call WOW factor. It might not be studio-grade authentic here, but it still makes you go “WOW” and that’s fine with me.

With the Haptic turned off, this is a seriously impressive-sounding headset. Listening to some Enslaved or some Jeremy Soul, it doesn’t matter, it all sounds tight, richly detailed, distortion-free and pretty damn loud too if you push it to the max. It’s one of the best sounding headsets on the market right now, and that’s not hyperbole, it’s a sound that’s really hard to beat without spending double what this headset costs. Movies and games benefit heavily from the powerful stereo sound, but also from Windows Sonic. I actually use Dolby Atmos Headphones processing myself, but they’ll all work fairly similarly.

There’s a built-in soundcard on the headset thanks to its USB design, so it’s really just plug and play. iCUE will allow you to tweak a few settings too though, but otherwise, the volume and microphone mute button are all you really need. The volume wheel is slow to adjust though, going from max to zero takes a good few turns, but that does make smaller adjustments easier too.

However, it’s this dial here, the Haptic dial. Or the wheel that brings equal fun and destruction really. This one doesn’t spin forever like the volume wheel, it has a defined stopping point for off and maximum, I’d say it seems to have about 5 distinct levels of output, from nothing to holy crap my head is being rattled.

It doesn’t add more bass, not one bit. However, it massively changes your perception of the existing bass levels. Think about how the room vibrates in a cinema with huge bass from explosions. Well, this is the same thing but only around your ears. Because bass isn’t directional, it does create a feeling of a much bigger sound, space and even volume. It’s a bit hit and miss with music, but because you can dial in the effect, just winding back to about 2/5 Haptic works well for music. Maxing is and listening to Cannibal Corpse – Frantic Disembowelment just felt like putting a power drill to my ears, as opposed to just listening to one.

However, watching a big action movie is great fun, and I watched The Battle of Pelennor Fields from The Lord of the Rings. The Haptic really puts a sense of scale to the larger animals and bigger impacts of the battle. For gaming, I found setting the haptic to half was perfect for some Halo Reach, giving grenades, guns, melee, etc, some real impact, without vibrating so much it tickled my ears; which does happen a bit on maximum.

The microphone has some decent noise cancellation too, drowning out a bit of keyboard or background music. It’s pretty decent overall for chatting on discord, and certainly a bit better than most of the stock microphones we find on headsets these days.

It has a small pop filter in the head, but there’s a foam head included in the box too should you need it.