Creative Sound Blaster Tactic 3D V2.0 Rage Review

Performance

As I stated before, I’m not completely taken by the aesthetics of the Rage headset, it’s a little fat and round looking, but after testing them out for a few hours, I’m betting their design is a result of function rather than appearance, because this is one amazing sounding headset! The sound quality is crystal clear from low volume, right up to their ear-shattering maximum. The drivers are very powerful, capable of deafening volumes, not that I would recommend using them at max volume, but if you’re faced with a quiet audio source, it’s nice to be able to boost it to something you can actually hear. Yet even at their upper limit, the sound is well-balanced and distortion free, which is obviously a good thing.

There a solid amount of bass, with a good punchy sound to it and the rest of the range is crammed full of detail that makes movies, music and games come to life. What really impresses me is how big the sound is. I often find headsets to sound a little direct, where you become very aware that there’s two small speakers right next to your ear, but that isn’t the case with the Rage. The sound has a lot of presence and it’s more like listening to bigger speakers in a nice listening area, rather than having them blast right in your ears. Things that are far away, feel far away, the sound of enemies creeping up behind you, feel like it, which is very impressive for a stereo headset with 3D sound processing, as most virtual sound setups often leave a lot to be desired.

Music performance was far better than I was expecting, bringing out a lot of detail in guitar tracks, with crystal clear vocals and a very natural sound overall. The same can be said for movie, with musical scores thundering through and still leaving enough range for all the sound effects and details that you would expect from a good speaker setup.

Gaming is easily the strongest aspect for this headset and the surround processions is great for picking out the locations of various sounds your environment. There’s plenty of software settings to tinker around with to fine tune the experience too and while the stock performance may not be what you want, you should easily be able to tune them to your own personal preference fairly quickly.

The microphone is bright and clear and team chat works very well with this headset, as would any chat applications such as Skype.

My only issue is the fit of the headset, it’s pretty tough for the first few hours and the headset needs to be broken in. The padding is a tough memory foam, but it’ll slowly shape to the user over time. If you find it uncomfortable at first, stick with it and it will definitely improve.