USB VoIP Headset with Mic and Volume Control product reviews

Ever since I first discovered VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol, aka Internet Phone and/or Voice Chat) I have had some form of microphone and speaker rig on my machine... not that it got used very often, due to the awesome sound pickup from the affordable microphones. Recording and playing back the signal from the mic was always the first thing I did, and I was usually cringing at how bad and scratchy it sounded... it was often a miracle that the other person could understand me. And I was never able to get speech recognition working... that was a pipe dream!

Then I got a chance to discover what the hype was about, when I got handed this unit a little while ago. Sleek, smooth and stylish in black and silver, with a nifty little control box on the wire and a boom mic that DIDN'T look like someone had put a blob of bluetack on the end of a chopstick and taped it to my head... quite frankly I didn't think it could be all that good... after all, the cost to manufacture something as swish as this would surely require substandard parts, wouldn't it?

Not on your nelly! This little headset is quality through and through, from the thin, yet strong cable, the quality plugs, the volume control box that hangs not right under your chin or down by your belt, but at a natural position just above your waist. If I crossed my arms, the controller could easily sit in my hand without tugging on the plugs, or my head. From this controller I can mute, or raise/lower the volume easily, and the green indicator light tells me it's operational. Excellent. The adjustable headstrap can be tweaked to fit most 'normal mean range' head sizes, and the microphone boom simply swivels down to position the mic in the perfect position for optimum sound pickup. No bent-coathanger-wire style boom to worry about snapping!

Installation was a breeze... turn PC on, wait until Windows has finally finished loading, plug the USB cable into an available port, and click a few self-explainatory buttons in the New Hardware wizard that popped up. These things just jumped in and took control without any real guidance from me... and that's where my one gripe comes in...

You see, I do a bit of multimedia work on the side, and I often run test-renders of the animations at various stages as I work... I pipe them out to the TV I have plugged in to the S-VGA port on the video card, and I pipe the sound out of the soundcard to the TV as well. However, when this headset is plugged in, it masquerades as the 'Windows Default Device' as well as the 'C-Media USB Headphone Set'... which means that ALL sound output gets piped to the headset... to get sound out of the TV, I have to unplug the headset from the USB port. Not a MAJOR issue for most people, I admit, but an occasional annoyance because of the way my system is configured. Multimedia designers and pc-as-home-theatre operators beware!

Overall, by far the best headset I have come across within a reasonable price range. Sure, it won't cup your whole ear and keep it warm on a cold winter's night, but they don't chaff, they are glasses-friendly (for those of us who wear the accursed things), and fit snugly and securely without being tight and uncomfortable. They are lovely and light, and the sound quality is astounding. I wound the bass up so much that my ears felt like they were about to bleed, and I could just detect some distortion, and my chatmate's noticed a huge improvement not only in the quality of the sound, but also a huge reduction in lag caused by the lack of soundcard processing delays. An excellent quality product, for cheap-as price! My only suggestion... as a consumer, I would be happy to pay another $1-$2 to have a 4m cable... 2m just doesn't reach far when you have no front USB ports available and have to plug into the back of the box.