Thermaltake eSports Shock One PC Headset Review

As with all my audio reviews I like to pick the content I use that I think is going to be the most challenging to the hardware I’m testing, given this headset is aimed at pro-gamers I jumped straight into to battlefield 3 multiplayer and campaign, with all the settings on the included audio software at default the sound quality was brilliant, the first thing I noticed when multiplayer loaded was that I could hear everything! thats right, they were set to maximum volume, turns out the in line remote controls the windows volume slider, not their own independent volume, I can confirm the sound is distortion free all the way upto the red line though, but be warned, this headset has a very powerful set of speakers, if your an audio sadist that wants to go deaf, you’ll do well with these speakers.

After turning the volume down, a lot, to regular edge of your seat loud, things we’re sounding fantastic, I’m pretty certain there is a sub woofer fitted to each speaker on this headset as the lower end thump of explosions in Battlefield 3 were mind numbingly deep without sacrificing any of the mid to high ranges of the sound.  It didn’t matter how much chaos was going on in game, the sound stayed pin sharp throughout.

Using Mumble and Skype for chat while gaming and just for general conversation out side of gaming was crystal clear too, the microphone was distortion and crackle free, if a little sensitive at times, apparantly making me sound like darth vader, but moving the microphone a little further down from my mouth soon fixed that.

I decided to fire up a few more games, going for a walk on the windy tundra of Skyrim, taking a stroll from Whiterun to Rorickstead is a great way to test out a lot of little details in a headset, for those of you who haven’t played Skyrim with a headset on, I highly recommend it, so many subtle sounds that you just don’t normally hear on your speakers, but with the Shock One headset I could hear the wind swirling around my head in glorious detail, heavier gusts firing up the invisible sub woofer I mentioned earlier.

Music performance was pretty good too, although not as good as the game performance, thats not a bad thing though, it still sounded fantastic, but I wouldn’t finding my self putting these on just to enjoy my favourite albums, I’ll explain about why I wouldn’t in the conclusion.

Movie performance was fantastic too, again I wouldn’t generally find my self putting these on to watch a movie, but I stuck them on and watched the battle of pelennor fields from the 3rd Lord of the Rings movie, I could hear the fine details of the battle as well as feel my teeth shaking from the foot steps of the giant battle elephants (if they have a proper name, I don’t know it).

I did try the headset out on a number of games, GTA IV, Waveform, Crysis 2 and beyond, performance was spot on across all the games, as far as audio for gaming goes, the Shock One is definitely up to the job.