Mionix Nash 20 Gaming Headset Review

Performance

Setting us the Nash is extremely easy, since it only uses two 3.5mm jack plus, it’s a simple as plugging it into the relevant ports and you’re good to go. I fired up a few games of Battlefield, Skyrim, Batman: Arkham Origins and Shift 2 to put the headset through its paces. Initial impressions of the headset were great, the sound quality is nothing short of incredible. Battlefield 3 really put the headset through its paces with screaming highs and heavy low-end bass notes while playing Conquest. The bass is really deep, but has a warm and gentle quality to it, completely distortion free no matter how hard you push the headset. Heavy bass often comes at the cost of the mid and high ranges of the audio, but not on the Nash 20; while playing Skyrim, every detail was crystal clear and on top of that I could hear more sounds of the landscape around me than I’ve ever heard. Batman and Shift 2 proved even better, the very detailed sound on this headset really draws you into the gaming world.

Music performance was even better than gaming, from thundering heavy metal to the wide dynamic ranges of classical music proved no trouble for the Nash 20, from low volumes, right up to the red line there was no distortion and the level of clarity was simply awe-inspiring. Movies were much the same, dialogue is crystal clear and the Battle of the Pelennor Field from Lord of the Rings: Return of the King was certainly immensely enjoyable while wearing this headset.

Testing the volume limits of the headset via my systems onboard audio managed to push the Nash 20 to 92 dBA, with sound leakage from the headset being 54 dBA at maximum volume and 44 dBA at 50% volume. This isn’t too bad, but expect to share what you’re listening to with those sat in close proximity to you. I hooked up the headset to the Silverstone EB03 and EB01-E desktop headphone amp and DAC to really push the limits and found that the headset peaked around 120 dBA before getting distorted; fortunately the headset was on the decibel meter and not my ears, or I would have blown my ear drums, even with the headset 6ft away from me the sound was on par with most desktop speakers!

The headset is equipped with a microphone and I’ve long been saying that 99% of headset microphones are unremarkable things, some have noise cancellation technology and other little tricks, but for the bulk of them it’s really hard to see much improvement in audio quality on services like Skype, TeamSpeaker and other in-game chat clients. However, the Nash 20 microphone really does outshine most any other I’ve tested. The background noise of my music, TV and my kids running around the house, barely registered while chatting, by it was still crystal clear at picking up my voice; I’m very impressed with the overall quality of this microphone.