Turtle Beach Stealth 520 PlayStation Wireless Gaming Headset Review

A Closer Look

Unsurprisingly, the headset looks pretty much like most other Turtle Beach headsets. This isn’t a problem, though, I quite like the design, it’s simple and lacks the general gaudiness that some “gaming” headsets exhibit, I’m 32 years old, I don’t want something with spikes and RGB lightning bolts dammit! /rant. The headset feels nice and durable, with nicely finished plastics that do a great job at keeping the overall weight down, as it’s especially lightweight for a wireless headset.

The headband and ear cups come with plenty of adjustment, which easily explains why the headset is so comfortable to wear. The ear cups turn inwards up to 90-degree, which ensures a clean fit around your ears, but also makes them comfortable to wear around your neck between games. There’s also a pivot to allow adjustments on both axis, so the headset should fit all shapes and sizes.

The headband has a slide adjustment which holds firmly in place and has a good range on it too, so it fits my kids heads as well as mine; perfect for all ages then!

The headband is flexible and can withstand a good amount of pulling and bending with ease, but it also managed to feel quite firm, keeping the headsets drivers firmly in place over your ears.

Don’t worry the force of the headset, as the soft breathable leather padding cushions the weight nicely, and I’ve no complaints after a few days usage, even if the padding needed wearing in a little bit at first, but that’s true of most headsets.

The memory foam in the headband is quite forgiving too, and while it doesn’t look like much, again I couldn’t find anything to complain about in terms of comfort after using the headset for a few days.

With a pair of 50mm drivers housed in those closed-back ear cups, you would expect the 520 to deliver a powerful sound with thick bass, and you would be absolutely right. Turtle Beach used to be seen/heard as a fairly mid-range brand, but the drivers they’ve been fitting to their headsets over the last few years are simply stunning. The sound quality is pin sharp, and has all the bass you could ever need right at your fingertips. The sound quality goes from great to awesome with the DTS Headphone:X feature too, so use that optical cable if you can and enjoy the rather sublime surround sound processing it offers.

All the controls are within easy reach too, with master volume controls right on the side of the headset. The most important one, however, is the presets buttons. They’re simply natural, bass boost, bass and treble boost, and vocal boost, but they’re effects are quite profound. It’s rare I find a headset where all the profiles sound good, but the 520 does have some great processing by default. Bass boost is great for music and action games, bass and treble for movies, vocal boost for FPS/team chat heavy gaming, and natural sound is just nicely balanced for a bit of everything.

The microphone monitoring is on by default, and you can adjust the microphone volume on the headset. Of course, you can also detach the microphone completely, or simply mute it with this button. The microphone is pretty sensitive and works just as well in games as it does for chat applications.

The wireless tech is flawless too, the headset paired with the dongle in seconds and didn’t falter at all throughout my testing. It worked straight away on PlayStation 4, but also on PC! Plug in the dongle and Windows 10 immediately paired up the headset, so that’s a nice bonus right there. The included 3.5mm cable is great too, as you can easily hook it up to a mobile device, or anything else with 3.5mm for that matter, but you still get the powerful sound processing courtesy of the headset, as it still uses the battery to power those punchy drivers.

Gaming, movies, music, phone calls, you name it, the 520 has the right stuff. With 15 hours battery life, you’ll not be fending for the charger too often, and with all the controls at your fingertips, you won’t be pausing your game to make adjustments all the time either. One of the best PlayStation headsets we’ve tested in a long time.