Pump up the volume! (Tritton AX360 Headphones)

Living with your girlfriend or other significant other is great. Apart from the more obvious benefits, you can share your bills, not worry too much about looking your best at all times, and have someone to cuddle up to on those cold winter nights. Yes, indeed, this guy has a sensitive side folks.

Being a gamer is also great. Excited like a kid as you play through the latest games on your expensive TV and sound system, spending all your money and time on them without a care in the world.

But, unlike love and marriage, the two don't go together, like, er, a horse and carriage, and while the problem of "spending too much time and money on those damn games" can't be easily rectified, the problem of the other half complaining about the noise, can. I'll tiptoe gently around the fact that more money has to be spent in order to do this.

Enter Tritton Audio Xtreme 360 Surround sound Headphones (or Tritton AX360 for short), saving relationships since 2006, probably.

My girlfriend actually bought me a pair of these for my birthday, much in the same way as you buy a friend deodorant and he thinks that you think he stinks, I realized then that maybe my gaming sessions were a bit loud, and that I probably stink (she also bought me deodorant). So, more a gift for her, but I won't complain, because they are simply fantastic!

How do they work?

So, surround sound through headphones? You are probably wondering, how does that work then? Good question! To put it simply, they work as each earpiece has four small speakers (eight in total) like so in each ear:

Front (40mm, 64OHM) (Frequency response range: 20-20KHz)
Centre (30mm,32OHM) (Frequency response range: 20-20KHz)
Rear (30mm,32OHM) (Frequency response range: 20-20KHz)
Subwoofer (30mm,80OHM) (Frequency response range: 20-120KHz)

Each speaker is placed strategically in each ear, with the front speakers more to the front, and the rear ones, you guessed it, more to the rear, in order to produce the surround sound effect, and although the speakers are quite small obviously, they can still produce very good sound.

Open the box

So, let's have a look at what you get in the box:

You'll notice that they have packaged in a lot of different cables with the headphones, which can seem a bit daunting at first, but they are only there to give you many different options for connecting your headphones to a PC or your games console, so you can take what you need, and put the rest in a dark cupboard, like I did.

The cables included are:

Digital Coaxial Cable
Digital Optical Cable
Converter cable
Microphone Cable
Microphone Itself with small cable

The main thing, apart from the headphones, is the small decoder box which has digital coaxial and digital optical inputs, as well as two "headset out" and three small jacks for 5.1 analog output (one for front, one for surround and one for center/subwoofer).

I have actually just used the digital optical cable which is plugged into my Xbox 360s VGA cable, which works a treat. It can also be connected to a soundcard on your PC, but to do this it will use the converter cable, and won't run through the decoder, which means that you won't get the full Dolby Digital 5.1 experience. I'd honestly recommend first having either an optical or coaxial digital out on your soundcard if you want to use these with a PC.

Features

• 5.1 channel headset
• 8 speakers for perfect surround sound
• Subwoofer with vibration
• High-End amplifier
• 4-in-1 volume control (separate volume adjustment)
• Automatic signal detection
• Supported Sound modes:
• Stereo
• Dolby® Pro Logic®
• Dolby® Digital 2.0
• Dolby® Digital 5.1
• TD (Time Delay)/DCR (Dynamic Range Control)
• 3 headsets connectable
• Removable microphone
• stereo/Dolby® Pro Logic®/Dolby® Digital signal switching

• Xbox® Live^TM compatible

The headphones also wear the badge of honor of being Dolby Digital Certified, just so you know that they are the real deal.

Installation Ease

Installation is very much straightforward with the Xbox 360. You simply plug the supplied Toslink cable into the "Digital In" socket on the decoder and the other end into the "Optical/Digital Out" socket on your Component Cable/Scart Cable/VGA cable (whichever one you have!) on your Xbox 360, plug your headphones into the socket on the decoder and you are good to go! Setting these up on other consoles such as the PS3 is also simple, again just by plugging the Toslink cable into your "Digital In" socket on the decoder and into the "Digital/Optical" out on your console.

Comfort/Feel

The Headset itself feels very comfortable when worn, with large soft padding on each earpiece and on the top and they don't hurt over an extended playtime, unless you have them turned up way too loud, but thats your own fault then anyway.

One thing is that they can become heated over a long play time, but nothing that will worry most people, and if it happens, it's probably time you took a quick break anyway.  This proves certainly handy for winter months though, as some kind of super expensive ear muffs that you can only wear at home.

Performance

I have a standard 5.1 surround sound setup at home which is quite good, but there's always the worry that the subwoofer thumping to explosions and the speakers making gunshot noises and cries of pain may annoy the neighbours, so I never have it turned up too loud anyway, thus losing the real benefits of 5.1 sound, so in effect, these headphones are much better, as I can turn them up as much as I want, without incurring the wrath of the Robertsons next door.

They provide a convincing surround sound effect and the absence of a subwoofer is rectified somewhat by a vibration function built into the headphones. It's not perfect, but it is good, and is a smart way to compensate for the lack of an actual subwoofer. This vibration effect can be adjusted as with the center, rear and front speakers to your own taste.

Online Gaming

A nice feature is that the headphones can be plugged into your Xbox 360 controller and the microphone on the headphones can be used instead of the Xbox live communicator, which is pretty cool, although you will have to set your Xbox Live voice settings to play all voices "through speakers", which can mean that the voices get mixed up in with the other game sounds and as such can be unclear, but I've found with some games, such as Halo 3, it works well enough and the voice comes through very clear, but you are sacrificing some of the other channels for the joy of hearing twelve year olds and Vince calling you a n00b every two minutes.  It does help if you aren't such a n00b though.

For other games I have tried adjusting the volume on different speakers to sort it out, that works to a certain degree but requires a lot of fiddling around and perhaps is not an ideal solution. Many might prefer to just use these headphones for mainly single player gaming. Overall though, I find it to be a handy feature when the game works with it but for most games playing on multiplayer when I need to hear people speak, I will probably not use these headphones.

Halo 3 Playtest

The first thing I did here was to walk towards a pretty waterfall and turn around full circle in game to see if the sound had a decent 360 degree effect and I was very pleased. The headphones do a surprsingly good job of producing a surround sound effect and with the first thing that struck me was that they sounded better than my standard 5.1 setup in a way, because they are free from the various sounds coming into my room from outside and other ambient interference such as the TV being watched by someone else at home, so you are getting 100% of the sound. This really adds to the feeling of "being in the game" in a way that my standard setup couldn't provide. So full marks here.

The next test was to run into a bunch of enemies and get shot at, which I'm quite good at strangely, and the sound of the bullets whoosing past was very impressive and on par with my standard setup in all but the most frantic of firefights. A lot of the time the quality of the surround sound effect in a game is more to do with how well its been implemented in the game rather than the headphones themselves, so Halo 3 is a good test here as it has arguably the best surround sound effects in a game to date. The headphones coped very well here and were better than I had expected.

The atmosphere in the more tense levels is superbly amplified by the use of these headphones, they really do a fantastic job in this particular area as you can hear every footstep from enemies and even the sound of the wind and birds chirping in the distance. They do a great job also with the soundtrack and the voices, shouts or sometimes growls of the computer controlled characters and enemies come through very clear and they come from all directions, with the headphones working well convincing you when the voices are coming from behind you. I've almost turned around by reflex a few times when I first got these. Sad, but true.

Some alteration may be required between different games, to the individual speakers' volume and the delay on each, but this is a quick and painless process, and soon you'll have your own preferences learned off. I suppose it's only the perfectionists that will notice anyway. Most gamers I suppose are pefecionists however.  Perfecionists...perfectionists, whatever.

Overall

As you would imagine, I was quite sceptical about how surround sound headphones would work initially but once I put these through their paces, they made a believer out of me. One clear benefit for many may also be that you don't need to have much space to use these, or to mess around placing speakers around the room, adjusting them to get the sound just right, which is quite difficult if you are playing in a room thats not perfectly square, which should be a problem for most people other than those playing games in a jail cell.  I've also mentioned that they take away the arguments about your games being too loud too, unless you are the type of person who likes to shout at the screen whilst playing, for which there is no easy solution I'm afraid.  Vince.

The only drawbacks are that you require another power socket for them which means more clutter around your gaming area, and the voice function on Xbox Live is a bit fiddly, so as I have said previously, they are more suited to single player gaming when you don't have to struggle hearing other people's voices.

But if you have made the decision to get surround sound headphones for gaming, then I can not recommend these any higher, they go beyond what you would expect and you will be very impressed. You can pick these up now for around 80 euros or 60 pounds, which is good value for such high quality, Dolby Digital certified headphones.

So overall, cheaper than moving home and they sound better than a complaining girlfriend.

Score: 4 and a half rabid sheep out of 5.

Comments

[Numinar]

I gotta try these next time I come over! Might skip the next game purchase to grab them...

And you don't smell Broll, it's your farts and BO that smell!