A Closer Look
This is one seriously cool looking piece of kit, which is good, as it’s going to spend all of its time up on top of your desk. As you can see, everything is very clearly labelled too, so even if you’re new to this, you can pretty much make out what everything does and how; it’s mostly intuitive.
Down the front edge, four LED lights showing which mode you’re on (there’s a switch on the back to set this). There’s a Dolby light, too, so you can see when that codec is active.
The main input and output are right on the front, offering you headphone and microphone inputs. Pretty straightforward stuff, really, plug and play.
All the buttons on the top are nice and large, and all have nice tactile clicks to them, making them comfortable to control. The C buttons are fully programmable, not sure why they’re C1-C4 when just numbers or ABCD would do just fine.
A master microphone mute button, handy if your microphone doesn’t have one of its own or is mounted overhead and unreachable.
There are two large dish-shaped dials, with the left one controlling master volume and the right mixing Game and Voice channels. There’s a smaller dial in the middle, which is used to adjust the parameters of the five function buttons there; Surround, Bass, SXFI, Treble, and Mic.
There is a simple two digit display in the middle.
There’s a small set of legs at the back, so it’s not sitting flat but just slightly forwards, making the controls easier to see.
Around the back, there’s a plethora of ports and buttons.
Master power control.
Input device mode.
USB C, this is both the master power input but can also be used for USB audio on PC (which is how I’ll be testing it, mostly).
Optical in and out, allowing you to pass through an amp, soundbar, console, etc.
Gain control.
Mobile line in, which is just the AUX channel, you could really plug anything from an old tape deck to your Alexa in here if you wanted. The same goes for the Line Out, which can go to speakers, another headset, a secondary mixer, whatever you want really.
