Hardware - Turtle Beach X1 Headphones

A Guest Article by Funk
I've always played CoD4 and MW2 with headphones on as I think it's one of the best advantages you can have in the game. The downside is that although you can hear exactly where people are, you can't actually talk to people in games. It bothers me sometimes being in games where people are slagging me off because I'm winning and not be able to respond in some way. I've been on the lookout for a headset that had decent sound that matched my awesome Sennheisers and a mic built in that worked with the 360. Recently I got these Turtle Beach X1's.

Not being a sound engineer it's kinda hard to explain technically why they're good but they seem to have an advantage over my Sennheisers in that the sound is amplified and boosted in the right areas. There's a massive bass boost and a focus on the sound of footsteps, reloading and enemies using tech like predators etc. You can actually hear the briefcase opening!

The wires are a bit fiddly to start with because you have a usb cable to the console and an audio jack to your sound source and then another lead from the sound controller to the pad. This allows independent control of game volume in your ears and the mic volume of people in the lobby. You do get a slight humm through the phones when there's no game sound but this is because of the bass boost I think -and you never notice it during gameplay.

Overall I'm well happy with them, they've made me even more devastating and now I can verbally slap people who start talking crap at me during games. The X1's are reasonably priced and if you want to spend another 50 quid on top you can get the wireless X31's.

If you're serious about your FPS's and you want mic ability too. Get these - they're awesome.

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