Turtle Beach Stealth 450 PC & Mobile Wireless Gaming Headset Review

Performance

The drivers on this headset are superb, although, given the great performance of previous Turtle Beach headsets I’ve tested this year, I wasn’t expecting anything less. The bass response is really good, picking out some very low-end grunt in music, movies and games, with a nice warmth and detail to the range. Most importantly to me, there’s no distortion to the sound at any volume level, meaning you can max the headset and no suffer loss in performance.

The maximum volume is reasonably loud, but could do with just a little notch more power. I’m not in a hurry to make myself deaf anytime soon, but sometimes you’re faced with a quiet audio source and the extra power is handy for a bit of a boost. It’s not a deal breaker, but those who like very loud music will want to look elsewhere, the mass majority of people will be more than happy through.

The EQ settings are amazing, in the fact that they actually work. Push the preset button on the headset and you’ll get an audio prompt telling you which profile you’ve just selected; “bass and treble boost” for example. The natural sound and the bass and treble boost are the most common and usable settings in my opinion, they sound great no matter what you’re listening to and untap a lot of tone range from the drivers. There’s also a vocal boost, which hushes bass quite a bit and makes the vocal tracks in movies and music bright and clear, but it really shines the most in games, allowing for more natural team chat beyond the options available from the separate volume controls.

The microphone is very clear and has a bright tone to it. It’s a little sensitive when monitoring and you can get every little click and pop your mouth makes coming back through the headset, but a quick tweak of the microphones angle can fix that without any issues.