A couple months ago PlanetXbox brought the readers a review of
Turtle Beach’s Ear Force X3 gaming headset and ended up very happy with its wireless offering. Now we have a chance to put the newest edition in the Ear Force series, the X4’s, through its paces. What Turtle Beach did was take all the complaints or constructive criticism it received on its X3 product and fixed, tweaked, or modified them into this new gaming headset. The situations where a gamer would need a high quality wireless set of headphones for their Xbox 360 is coming about more and more as developers push the limits on the audio portions of today’s next-gen video games. Featuring full Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound support and a slew of other features helps catapult the X4’s into the top choice for gaming headphones.
Turtle Beach Ear Force X4 Features:
- Enjoy Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound with your favorite games and DVD movies
- Dolby Pro Logic II provides surround sound from PLII encoded audio and also enhances stereo
- Hear XBOX Live Chat plus stereo game sound
- Heart-thumping bass boost adds sonic realism
- Dynamic Talkback lets you hear chat even when the game gets louder
- Separate controls for game and chat volumes
- Eliminates game sounds picked up by chat mic and Mic Monitor lets you hear what you're saying thought the earphones
- Digital input for highest XBOX sound quality, plus analog input for TV and other audio sources
What does all this technical jibberish mean to the average gamer you ask, well simply put it means that owners of the X4’s will get superb audio quality sent to their ears wirelessly from their Xbox 360 system. When we first opened the package containing the headphones our first thought was, “wow these things are big”; and on first sight they do look relatively large. However if you consider what features (see above list) the product includes it kind of washes away any negative feelings about the bulkiness of the unit. Surprisingly after having the headset on our head during play-test for a couple minutes it was hard to remember just how large they were, the insanely comfortable mesh around the ear pieces molds to the wearers skull quite nicely. Gone are the cold, unnatural feeling ear-pieces of the X3 unit; probably because the ear-piece itself has to be larger to house all the speakers needed to create that real Dolby surround effect.
The look of the Ear Force X4 gaming headset matches the style Microsoft was going with the Xbox 360 perfectly. Turtle Beach decided to coat the entire unit in off-white and grey colors respectively. A half-moon shaped piece wraps around the top part of your head, holding the unit in place without being too tight or uncomfortable. Two circular wireless transmitters are placed on each side of the headset giving the wearer a nice range to connect with the base unit. Lastly, when it comes to cosmetics, is the high-quality Xbox Live microphone that swings down from the side of the headset, staying conspicuously out of place until needed for online chatting. There are a couple different buttons on the headset itself so users never need to get their lazy butt off the couch to tweak settings. The small power button is easy to find as is the bass booster and volume dial for upping or lowering the volume while the unit is still on one’s head.
Because the headset is wireless (unless of course you are using the microphone, which has to then be plugged into your wireless 360 controller) Turtle Beach includes a very nice looking component base unit, into which your 360’s audio streams via an optical input. The base unit (pictured below) is made up of the same white/grey color scheme with the infrared transmitter located on the front panel. Turtle Beach’s website boasts a range of 30 feet for the wireless transmission on the X4’s but we found during testing that audio quality continued to stream flawlessly up to 45 feet away from the base unit. The one negative quality that infrared devices hold is the fact that if, at any time while in use, the two pieces lose direct sight of each other all audio is temporarily lost (which means no outside smoke-breaks during gaming sessions).
