Creative Fatal1ty Pro Series Gaming Headset

They may be extremely comfortable, but there are quite a few flaws in Creative’s Fatality branded gaming headphones.

If you’re used to iPod headphones, these are a fairly major step up. You’d expect them to be, as they cost $300, but that kind of money can buy other quality headphones, and the sound simply doesn’t compare to alternatives from Sennheiser or Beyerdynamic. Fidelity aside, these are primarily geared towards gamers who want comfortable headphones and clear vocal performance. Unfortunately, the focus on vocals has come at the expense of audio quality.

They certainly look the part and are extremely comfortable. In extended LANing sessions their soft velvet ear pads are a blessing. They are closed back, which means they don’t leak as much sound to the outside world as open headphones (and the sound from the outside world is muted), so they should be a lot punchier than open-back headphones. However, this is not the case.

The acoustic response is very underwhelming at both the treble and bass ends of the audio spectrum, leaving you with thin, lackluster sound, with a lot of midrange in the mix. This is not altogether surprising, as the midrange is where voice sits in the audio spectrum, at around 1 KHz.

The microphone boom is really quite depressing. The mic’s virtues as a military grade piece of kit are shouted from all sides of the packaging, however the boom slowly sinks from your desired position to as low as gravity and the mechanism will let it drop. Between this and the musically-dead frequency response, these headphones are, at the very least, targeted at gamers who need to clearly understand what their team-mates are saying above in-game sound effects.

This brings us to the problem: if you are hardcore to the point where being able to decipher your teammates during a game takes precedence over music and sound effects, you’d simply pull the in-game sound down a few notches. Because of this, we question Creative’s design decision as these don’t seem engineered to deliver a better gaming experience.

Moving onto the package, it fits the bill for high end headphones. The unspoken rule at this kind of price is that cables are made of thick oxygen-free copper with gold-plated terminals -- the Fatal1ty gaming headset’s cables check both these boxes. It also comes in at 2.4 metres long and splits off to run into both drivers, instead of running into one side and around the headband. You get an in-line volume control and microphone mute slide switch, located at full extended arm’s length from your head. They are non-replaceable, unlike offerings from Sennheiser, so if you damage the cables under a chair’s wheels, you can’t replace them.

In light of our concerns over audio reproduction and our issues with the boom mic’s lack of sturdiness, we simply can’t recommend the gaming headset. It would have been worth considering at $150, but the construction would have to be greatly improved. As it stands, we just can’t overlook the flaws.

Jonathan ‘Fatal1ty’ Wendel would be unimpressed. This seems more about getting Wendel’s face on every gaming peripheral than making a high quality gaming headset.