 Buy an unlocked Intel 4th Gen Core i7 or Core i5 processor and get a free copy of Rome 2 Total War. Click now to learn more. Welcome to the first in a series of wireless gaming headset reviews. We are actually going to have the H Wireless and the Vengeance 2100 coming soon, but this my friends is the Astro A50 gaming headset. Now I've been asked a lot of times to cover Astro products, but as a member of the so called glorious PC gaming master race, I actually thought that they were a small niche brand until I went to Pax Prime, and they were absolutely everywhere. I mean like everyone was using these headphones, and I was like okay, so I smartened up and promptly went to see Astro and asked them to hit me with their best shot so to speak, and the guy punched me. Whereupon I quickly clarified that I meant for him to send me a headset after the show, and here we are, one headset and one sore gut later. Now let's go ahead and open this baby up. They actually sent over the A50 wireless headset, which is their premium top of the line headset, and it happens to be the Battlefield 4 edition. So it comes with a little stop, don't return this to the store, contact Astro for support as well as a quick start guide, but you probably won't need that because it was pretty easy for me to set up anyway. And then we also find the headset itself, the Mixamp TX, which is their base station right here, the wireless transmitter, and then another piece of plastic that's removed. Their packaging is excellent, really like this. Then underneath that we find an Xbox chat cable, we find a USB charging cable, as well as another USB charging cable. This is cool because you can actually run one cable to the base station, and then it has a pass-through for charging, so the base station can actually sit on the iS included headphone stand, and then charge your headset from there. So I'm just going to go ahead and pop that out, and then of course there's a SpitF audio cable, so that's an optical audio cable under there as well. Now construction and looks of the headset itself. With some metal in the construction, actually these posts right here, and a softer foam than the Vengeance 2100s with a really nice soft cloth covering, the material quality feels better than average, especially for a gaming headset. They are a little bit on the heavy side, but that's probably the sturdy metal posts that are used for the size adjustments. The ID, the industrial design, I feel strikes a fantastic balance between gamery looking and pro grade with a mostly black color scheme, with a couple of tasteful orange accents. I mean, I don't know about you guys, but I'd feel pretty silly spending $300 on something that looks like a toy for 12 year olds. So I think that this was a great way to go, even though it is a, you know, BF4 edition. Like I don't mind getting a couple in-game items with my purchase, and a bit of a different color scheme, but I don't want game branding plastered all over it either, like we've seen with some Logitech peripherals in the past. In terms of general features, they weigh in at 360 grams or so. They are PC, Mac, Xbox, PlayStation, phone, AV system, whatever compatible you can plug in anything with an optical out, or an auxiliary out into them, as well as USB. It has, they have an integrated non-user replaceable battery, which is comparable to the Vengeance 2100s, but I don't feel is as strong as SteelSeries' swappable battery system on the H Wireless. And I think that's pretty much it for my little feature list. In terms of comfort, they were not comfortable to me at first. They have very little clamping pressure, even out of the box. So there's not really much breaking, and I found them quite difficult to wear. I found that they were like falling off my head until I tweaked the headband size a little bit tighter than I would normally like to do, and then they were very solid. Now, the A50's headband gets away with the required tightness for a couple of reasons. So number one is it has a very soft foam, and number two, even more importantly, this flexible middle piece right here is really smart, because even if your ears aren't quite aligned on your head like mine aren't, you are able to clamp it a fair bit tighter, and it adjusts to your head. It's actually quite nice. And now that I know how to use it properly, I give them a definite gold star of appreciation for comfort. The material on the ear cups doesn't really feel like anything special on the ears, but the foam inside is a nice medium softness, feels like a memory foam, nice slow retraction, so combined with the very, very soft material here, but I mean, like I said, it doesn't feel like leather or anything, it just feels like a really nice soft material. They are definitely good enough out of the box and should even break in even nicer in the long term. They are noticeably heavier than the Vengeance 2100s and the SteelSeries H Wireless, but particularly compared to the 2100s, I find that because the weight is sitting in closer to your head, I don't get as much shake even when I move my head quite quickly. Now, their website has some nonsense about wearing them around your neck or over your head, but I just, I got to call them out on that because they are going to slip right off of me, and I have a medium size head, and they are basically like, they are hanging off your ears at that point. That's like saying you could wear your hoodie backwards. You could, but you won't. Alright, let's move on to the range test. For my range test, I did five different locations. I stayed within the same room, so that's about a 10 foot max. I went down to the other side of the wall, but still quite close. I went down a hallway. I went down to the stair landing, which is like 15 feet away and a wall. I went down to the bathroom downstairs, and finally, I went down to the basement with the base station itself installed in my office connected to my laptop. So, this was, I performed about the same as the Vengeance 2100 for our range test. Maximum volume of the Astro A50s. These can easily get uncomfortably loud. There is no shortage of amplification going on here. So, unlike the H Wireless, which actually didn't get like painfully loud for me, these ones, you can drive them as high as you want to go. However, unlike both the H Wireless and the Vengeance 2100, they don't seem to have any kind of limiter to prevent over driving the speakers and introducing distortion. The A50s just let you go as high as you want, even though it'll sound like completely like ass once you get to a certain level. But don't worry about that, guys. The distortion doesn't come in until long after most people would be extremely uncomfortable. In terms of noise isolation, I'd say they're about average for a closed-back headphone. The cloth earcups are going to resist a sweat more than something like a faux leather, but what they also do is they leak sound more than a faux leather would. So, you know, whether you like isolation or whether you don't is up to you, but I'd say they're about average for closed-back, which is generally more isolation. Now, let's move on to the listening tests. All of these tests were performed using the onboard DAC, so I wasn't actually using the analog in a separate DAC. This gives us the best apples-to-apples comparison for the way most people are going to use these, and we use them on a PC. For sound quality, I would say it is adequate. It's really nothing special, especially at $300, and especially compared to the better SteelSeries H wireless. With that said, while the usual sin that gaming headsets commit, which is the overdone, boomy bass at the expense of other parts of the listening experience, isn't nearly as bad as some other gaming headsets, notably the Razer Kraken Forge, which is also $300, there is definitely some looseness and boominess to the bass, and some details in the mids are lost, even with the balanced EQ setting, in fact, to the point where the mids were kind of hard to evaluate. They're there. I mean, they're good enough that I can hear everything clearly. It's not like the dialogue in a movie or a male vocalist in a song is going to be completely impossible to hear, but they are obscured somewhat by the lows. Highs, on the other hand, are clear, which is expected. You've got to hear dim footsteps if you're going to market something as a gaming headset, so the A50s definitely don't disappoint there. I guess that's most of what I have to say for subjective listening tests, but I feel like it's important to mention that when we're comparing $300 wireless gaming headsets against what else you can buy for $300, we have to be fair. So I could say, yeah, for $200, you could get wired, audiophile-grade headphones that'll blow the doors off of these, or really the other ones in this roundup as well, but because I don't really have any experience with audiophile-grade wireless headphones, I can't really speak to whether they're a great value against $300 audiophile wireless headphones, so all I can really do is compare these three against each other and talk about it that way. So first up, for double the price of a Corsair Vengeance 2100, you're getting more bass, certainly. You are missing out on some of the details in the mids, but you are also getting the included stand. You are getting varied, configurable inputs, and you're getting console compatibility, which is sort of a big deal. The 2100 is PC only, well, Mac only as well, but you have to have a USB port that, like, drivers and stuff. You're also getting more premium-feeling materials compared to the 2100s, and you're getting the handy-dandy controls on the right ear cup that let you change your EQ profiles, so there's three different presets. You can adjust the mix between chat volume and game volume on the fly just by pressing these buttons right here. That's a very nifty little feature, but you are paying twice as much for it. Compared to the SteelSeries H Wireless, which costs the same, you're getting much stronger, like, more sound in that very low frequency range, but other than that, they are quite feature-comparable, and the H Wirelesses do sound well-roundedly overall better. I mean, for me personally, that trade-off of more rumble is not worth it, but if you want your ears to tickle and you want to feel it when an explosion goes off, then I guess these would be the ones to do it for you. The last thing, this is something I'll let you guys kind of listen to for a moment. This is my microphone test with the Astro A50 wireless microphone. I hope you guys enjoyed it. So that was my microphone test. I don't think I have to tell you how good the microphone is on the A50s. I consider it to be a courtesy thing to have a microphone that is not offensive for your teammates to listen to, and this one really doesn't qualify for me. I mean, data compression in online chat applications will level the playing field a little bit, because even a good source won't sound that great, but starting with a better source does still help a lot, and these were by far the worst-performing microphone in the Roundup. I also don't really like boom mics compared to retractable ones. The ideal position for a headset microphone is the corner of your mouth, and I find that with a boom mic, it's like, what do I do? Do I bend it here first so that I can try and get it in the right spot? I find them hard to adjust to get in exactly the right spot, so they end up in front of your mouth a lot. The position lock, see, you can see it actually locks into position, and the automatic mute that goes along with this boom mic, though, is actually not a terrible implementation. So I think that's pretty much it for the Astro A50s. Like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, leave a comment and let me know who you think is going to be the big winner of this Roundup. I think I've probably given a fair number of hints already, but regardless, let me know what you think, and as always guys, don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos. Thanks for watching!