Cyber Snipa Sonar 5.1 gaming headset

David Field hates what he hears, and delivers a bitter review of a bad pair of headphones.

I have never listened to a pair of “surround headphones” that I would describe as good.

And thanks to Cyber Snipa’s latest offering, the quest for a decent pair is set to continue.

Gaming surround headphones eschew the time honoured and effective concept of placing one driver next to each ear by throwing them unceremoniously in the bin and replacing them with three poxy, underwhelming and flaccid drivers aimed at different angles around your ear that claim to simulate a full positional audio experience.

The result is predictably bad, and may be familiar ground to some of you. Razer tried this before with their stupid gaming headset that ended in a DVI plug that in one physical connection did electrically what three physical 3.5mm audio jacks do for surround systems. It may have come with a breakout adapter, and plugging them into your video card accidentally is probably harmless for the headphones, but I don’t know or want to theorise about what placing 8 ohm resistors across random pins of your video card’s output could do.

The Cyber Sniper doesn’t quite reach these levels of sheer, unadulterated stupidity, but does terminate with a USB interface. How this could be considered a sound design philosophy is beyond me. It means you can only ever plug them into your PC, you can’t use them with anything equipped with a standard 3.5mm analogue plug (or any variant of analogue audio).

All this is well and good if you get a gleeful kick out of pissing away money like a technology CEO using venture capital to crush endangered species into petrol for his boat upon which he’s hosting a gig to promote green computing -- but even the Sultan of Brunei would feel cheated after buying these things because the bastards don’t work.

Originally we plugged them in and sound emerged. God was in his heaven, all was right with the world (not an Evangellion reference, but rather a reference to the new series of Doctor Who that itself is a reference to Evangellion). Never mind that they sounded like wilting lettuce, the important part is that they sounded like something.

That was until we went to push the volume up button on the controller, at which point they promptly crapped out on us. We tried a different USB port, and again they worked until we pushed a button. Rinse, lather, repeat. Sometime later, they simply gave up.

The sound was below average. The bass seemed forced, the treble tinny. They were comfortable, but heated up too quickly and didn’t have enough space inside them as our trusty reference pair of Sennheiser HD280 Pros.

Forget about all the shiny new effects your shiny new sound card can produce. The Cyber Snipa cans act as their own sound card and did not appear with any support for EAX during testing.

The blisteringly bright blue LEDs (one for on, one for Mic un-muted) are distracting; if not for you then for the poor sods around you who happen to have caught them in their peripheral vision. We became so disenchanted with the set that we never managed to troubleshoot them back to life to the point where they worked again and we could test the microphone, but we will give it a point for not slowly sliding downwards.

They work for suitably small values of work. Might we suggest you run across the street to avoid them. Bonus points if a Sennheiser or Beyer dealer is across the road. They would have scored worse if they were more expensive, but $100 is kind of cheap by comparison to the Razor Barracuda HP-1.

Regardless, they’re not worth the money.