Tritton PC510 HDa Gaming Headset Review

PerformanceThe first thing that I thought when I picked this headset up is how well made it is. The quality of the materials used is certainly very good and it has a nice solid feel. For this reason we are confident that this headset would last, it is not going to fall apart in a few months or even a few years. Always a good start.

While the quality is good you would probably expect the comfort to be good and in fact this is the case. The headset sits nicely, although it does apply a fair bit of pressure as they have a decent weight, the ear cups fit over your ears nicely and do a good job at blocking out other sounds. This headset is fairly large but it does not feel bulky to wear.

The sound-quality of this headset is impressive, although the size of the speakers individually (with the exception of the sub) are not quite as big as some of the other headsets they still reproduce a good sound quality. We were very impressed with the sub speaker which could certainly a pack a punch while having a nice warmth and depth to it. The frequency response of this is headset is quoted at 20Hz-30KHz which is very interesting as the human ear can’t hear much over 20kHZ (depending on age etc) but its a shame they didn’t manage to push the sub speaker down a little bit more as it then gives a bit more life to classical musical or gunshots (two randomly chosen examples!). That said, no other headset on the market has a better frequency range.

Next, I want to talk about the surround-sound and normally I would explain that with most other headsets, how they struggle to produce anything too impressive as they are trying to pump several channels into just one speaker which is never going to work. The Tritton PC 510 HDA on the other hand was built from the ground up to be a True 5.1 Analog gaming headset and so it doesn’t use any fancy converters or dolby digital decoders it just uses pure raw 5.1 surround sound and this is not tweaked, tuned or adjusted it is just played as the pure sound. This is because they have enough speakers to play each channel independently and so this headset works as if you just had 5.1 speakers. This is pure surround sound and I was impressed with how good it truly is. I was expecting it hard to be able to tell which is the rear and the front as they are so close together over your ear, but it is easy. Each channel feels separated and so in a game you can tell exactly where someone behind you is, where that last gunshot went off from. There are no tricks to this headset and that is why it excels in this section, true analog surround sound cannot be beaten.

As this is a headset it does have a microphone and to be honest compared to the other features it was always going to get overlooked. However, the microphone is good and very clear. I like that it is detachable and flexible as this gives it a lot more durability as it is less likely to get in the way. If you aren’t going to use it you can store it away safely for a bit and you can always plug it back in within a second. Also to note, having an in-line volume control module with individual dials for each channel is surprisingly useful, especially when you end up listening to stuff that isn’t full 5.1 surround sound as you can then re-balance the front and sub channels.