Roccat Kave Headset

A Closer Look
There are a lot of details to the Roccat Kave so we will try to cover them in a methodical order, starting first with the User Guide and CD. In fact, there is no standard User Guide or Driver CD, this did cause slight confusion as there is a packet containing both a manual sized booklet and a CD. The CD contains a User Manual in PDF format as well as a 5.1 Surround Sound Demo – which is good if you don’t have a DVD or Game to hand when checking it is all working! The booklet is a Roccat ‘confidential document’ and quite frankly I don’t know what it is trying to achieve other than to confuse people. It is however rather irrelevant to the product as it is presumably shipped with all Roccat products. Inside this, loose, was in fact a Quick Installation Guide which gives you the basic diagrams of how to install the device and gives you the instructions in various languages. I do doubt it was intended to be hidden!

Now taking a look at the connections itself – there are 5 in total. They are USB and 4*3.5mm jacks. These are for the Front, Rear and Centre/Subwoofer Channels as well as a microphone jack. Normally on a 5.1 sound card you have both a Centre and Subwoofer socket available separately but they have for some reason been combined on the Roccat leaving you with the centre socket free which seems like a weird thing to do. They are however colour coded so should be easy to plug them in correctly!

Moving further up the cable, we get to the desktop remote, this at a first glance looks like a standard volume control that you most probably have for your speakers.

However, there is also another button for muting the microphone. Unusually however, there is a part of this remote that opens up, exposing a channel equaliser. This includes a slide for ‘Center, Front, Rear and Sub’, as well as a Game/Movie selection. In the centre of the volume control is also a mute button which will mute your computer volume. This in general is fairly self-explanatory and gives you easy access to a lot of controls.

The headset itself is quite large, it has to be said again, the individual ear cups nearly have a diameter of 10 centimetres each. This is in fact bigger than most people’s desktop speakers!

They are however not meant to be that heavy. Each cup pivots in a single axis but pivots in two places so allows you to fold them up into a smaller area. On the left hand cup is the boom microphone.

This has a nice blue LED light to let you know when the microphone is active and should help avoid those awkward and embarrassing times when you continue to talk about the person you were just talking to and haven’t in fact turned the microphone off.

The headband is quite wide to try and spread the weight a bit more and it is well cushioned to make sure it doesn’t dig in, although the individual ear cups are designed to support the weight of the headset as they fit quite tightly. Of course you can extend the length of the headband on a scale up to 10.

This headset can also be folded up slightly to minimise the space they take up.