Roccat Syn Pro Air Wireless 3D Audio RGB Headset Review

A Closer Look & Performance

The headset is clearly a departure from their previous designs, which were frankly a bit old-school looking even when they were new; the ELO, Kahn Pro, and the NOZ for example. However, this new one is much more modern and stylish, even futuristic from some angles and it also looks rather unique among its competitors too, which is always a bonus.

The ear cups are quite deep, albeit a lot of that is the ear cup padding. However, they use a rather interesting rectangle design for the housing, with softened corners and edges to prevent it from looking too blocky. It’s also a closed-back driver design too, which should help lock in the sound, and of course, block out external noises too.

The ear cups are mounted on a pivoting arm recessed into the headband, giving them a much more streamlined profile. That’s a good thing too, because the ear cups themselves are quite chunky, so this balances those dimensions out rather well, actually.

This is actually the slider mechanism for adjusting the size too, and it is designed so that you don’t see any screws or fittings, giving it a really clean and stylish look overall.

It doesn’t have a huge range of movement, but it does fit my large head comfortably, and very few headsets do. However, that does raise the concern that it may not fit those with tiny heads, most headsets go smaller than this, as such, my 8-year-old daughter cannot wear this headset. Not a huge problem for most gamers, I’m sure, but something to keep in mind.

The headband keeps that classic Roccat trait by being hyper-flexible. It can be bent and twisted quite a lot and flexes back to true every time. This helps it provide a really smooth and balanced fit around your ears too. While the headset holds well to your ears, it doesn’t deliver a particularly strong clamping force around your ears. It simply relies on deeper ear cup pads to provide a clean fit around your ears.

Roccat takes the padding seriously with this headset, offering more padding on the headband and ear cups than we typically see these days. What’s surprising is that there’s so much of it given the headset its self is already pretty lightweight anyway, so comfort certainly won’t be an issue.

It may feel a little unsettled initially, as the foam is a little on the harder side. However, from experience of their headsets (and Turtle Beach, who use the same foams), it’s designed to wear in over the first few days/weeks usage and will become a lot more comfortable very quickly.

The pivoting ear cups will certainly help provide a cleaner fit around your ears. However, the headset also rotates flat like this, allowing you to comfortably wear it around your neck between uses. It’s a small detail, but one I certainly appreciate, as I have my headset around my neck quite a lot between various tasks.

You can see a small logo down the side of the headset, but overall branding has been kept to a minimum here. There’s a round cap plugging a hole too, which is for the microphone and there’s a removable sticker on there so you know what it is.

The bottom of each earcup houses a control dial.

They’re quite large too, making it easy to index the wheels while you’re wearing the headset.

One wheel controls the master volume levels, while the other is for the microphone monitor level. It’s nice having granular control over the sidetone too, rather than just an on/off setting that many headsets deploy.

Towards the bottom, there’s a recess housing the power button and charging port. There’s a small LED here too, so you can see that it’s actually charging/charged.

Charging the headset won’t take long, thanks to the USB-C port. You can charge them while you’re using them too (using a USB power bank or something similar), so you never need to stop gaming. However, it’s unlikely you’ll need to, as they promise 24 hours battery life. I got around 20 hours, but I have been running them pretty hard and had the RGB cranked at all times too.

Fitting the microphone is easy enough. However, it has a pivot of its own, so you can fold it up 90-degrees when it’s not in use, and it’ll auto-mute its self. That’s a feature we normally see on hard-wired booms, so it’s cool to see it combined with a removable microphone design.

The Syn Pro headset deploys Roccat’s latest 50mm drivers, which run from 20Hz – 20kHz, and I believe they’re the same ones you find on high-end Turtle Beach models; that’s no bad thing in my experience, they’re great drivers.

While the headset deploys closed-back drivers, which do a good job of locking in the sound, you must remember the foam padding. The headset uses an “athletic fabric foam cushioning” that is breathable, so it does leak some sound and let in some ambient noise. However, it strikes a good balance.

The ear cups are really deep, fit right around your ears, and get the drivers nice and close to your head, resulting in a clear and powerful sound even at lower volumes. It’s one of the few headsets I’ve tested that is perfectly usable at 10-40% volume. However, 40-70% is where it really comes alive. Beyond that, it’s quite loud, so use your own judgement if you need all that extra womp.

Strangely, you can’t seem to change the profile/EQ mode from the headset its self, so you do need the software. The headset has a fairly flat sound profile at the default settings, which offers rather tremendous clarity for voice chat and competitive gaming. However, listening to some music I noticed bass tracks, drums and the low-end on guitars were feeling pretty hollow, but everything in the mid-range and above was beautifully detailed.

The Neon software was easy enough to install, and it’s here that you can really customise all the options available to you. Most importantly, the EQ, but also the 3D audio technology and the RGB can be configured here also. It performed the usual suite of updates to the headset on first boot, which I strongly suggest.

The UI and software are still in BETA, as a result, sometimes the settings didn’t stick and I’d have to toggle them off/on again. It’s also not particularly intuitive and makes no effort to explain what everything does. There’s an EQ, but there are no pre-made profiles to pick from, which is odd. Thankfully, once it’s setup you can ditch the software, so take that for what its worth at the moment, and expect some updates in the coming weeks.

As for the sound, though, with a few settings tweaked, I found all that missing bass. The headset packs a punch too, you can get a good bass-heavy sound but it’s certainly not overdone. Albeit, you’re not going to get a super low bass effect with the breathable ear pads anyway. However, despite the drivers being so close to your ear, the soundscape sounds amazingly wide and open, which is impressive. This is further improved with Waves3D audio, which gives a perfectly convincing surround effect. However, if you have DolbyAtmos for Headphones or a DTS:X licence for Windows 10, the effect is comparable to those. Which effect surround processing you choose, the drivers handle it well.

Overall, it’s a really stylish headset with great drivers, which is for the moment let down by the new BETA software, but that will improve over time.