IYO, what is the best gaming headset?

[joshvvx]

Hello Toms Hardware community,

I currently have a Turtlebeach X12 headset, and I am looking to upgrade. These are very old and the microphone isn't great.
I've looked around, but because it's 2018, I only see wireless headsets which I hear are nothing in comparison to wired headsets for obvious reasons. I was going to get the Astro A50 but I spoke to an owner of it and they said it wasn't great sound quality, plus it's like $300.

I'm looking for over-ear, dulby 7.1 surround sound, comfortable, wired, and I'd prefer for the mute/volume control to be somewhere on the headset itself because when it's on the wire I tend to knock it with my arm and the volume goes up a ton (also I want to mute quickly without needing to find the spot on the wire)

If you know a headset with those specs, please drop it below, but if you don't have time don't worry about it.

Thank you very much!

 

[doolittle]

I have had quite a few headsets break from wear and tear and agree the quality is not the greatest (in both build quality and audio clarity).

I have built my own headset using a budget studio headphone (the Samson SR850, currently under $35), a budget mic (the Zalman ZM – Mic1, under $10), and a USB sound card that supports dolby and vsurround (Sound Blaster PLAY! 3, $25) and much, much happier. Did a lot of research and found these to be the best value-per-dollar DIY headset solution.

For the mute/volume control, I am using my keyboard's FN keys to control them but there are other ways to bind them to a shortcut or hotkey using NirCmd - example here and more details about NirCmd itself here.

If you are really on a budget but can't do the USB sound card, you can ditch the Dolby requirement and use one of these software vsurround solutions:

- Windows 10 "sonic" spatial sound
- on-board Realtek "headphone virtualization" (if your on-board driver supports it)
- 3rd-party like "Razer Surround"

Although if you listen to properly encoded movies having the dolby playback does sound quite good.