REVIEW: Turtle Beach Earforce X41

For Turtle Beach's official site for the Earforce X41s Click Here

I picked up a set of X41s off Amazon a couple months ago, but I did not want to write up anything until after I'd burned through some batteries and dropped them a few times. Seeing as both of those criteria are completed, here we go...

Amazing clarity, ability to change the way voice chat falls in the audio mix, and sound isolation (aka you get to have great sound without bothering anyone else). What more could you ask for?

more after the jump

A couple years ago I picked up a logitech 5.1 surround sound setup so I could hear everything the xbox 360 had to offer as clearly as I could possibly get it. I was (and still am) blown away by the quality of the sound and the clarity of DIRECTIONAL sound. Someone running up behind me? I know it. Bullet whizzing by from my back right to my front left? I know it. So, why did I buy a set of X41s?

It's simple really. I can't remember the last time I was able to USE my surround sound. The sub woofer shakes my house every time a grenade goes off and my wife is supposed to sleep through this? She works early mornings and I work nights, so when I'm off and want to get some gaming/movie time in, it's almost in silence. Before I was married it was roommates, neighbors, family members, whatever. I had this beast that could crank the immersion level of any game through the roof but could never use it to its full potential.... so I went shopping...

What I was looking for

I needed a sound system that could rival my surround sound but give me total sound isolation. I wanted it to be designed to work with xbox 360 so I wouldn't have to rig something special up to be able to chat with my friends/teammates. It also needed to have a way to bring voice chat up and down in the audio mix so I could adjust how loud the voices were in relation to the game audio... after all, if you can't hear people chatting, why have voice chat? I preferred to have a wired setup because I already carry two cell phones, a bluetooth headset, use a wireless keyboard and mouse, and a wireless controller and I'm just tired of charging batteries. I work nights and it had been so long since I had enjoyed game audio that cost really wasn't an issue. I wanted the best that I could get.

Why did I choose the Earforce X41s by Turtle Beach?

I asked around to see if any of my xbox live friends were using surround sound headsets. As it turned out, a few of my friends from work had been using Turtle Beach headsets for years and had no complaints. My only problem with the x41s at this stage was that they require 2AAA batteries. They include one set of AAAs, but I burned through them on night one. When I compared what I was looking for vs what the x41s had to offer it was almost a perfect match. The brand came highly recommended and since I was buying via Amazon I had nothing to lose if they turned out to be sub par. [NOTE: Amazon's return policy is amazing.]

My Order and First Impressions

I was not going to use any high tech device with standard batteries, so I ordered myself a duracell charger that came with 4AA rechargeable batteries and 4AAA rechargeable batteries (all pre-charged). I also picked up an HDMI adapter for my xbox 360... but that is collecting dust now that I'm recording everything via my Hauppauge HD PVR which does not accept HDMI.

Setup was easy. The X41s come with an optical cable so I was able to pass the sound through the base unit of the x41s to my surround sound for the times when I'm not the only one who wants to hear what's going on. I can't stress enough how happy it makes me that companies are packaging their hardware with the appropriate cables. Even Sony has begun packaging their PS3s with HDMI cables... FINALLY. This makes two purchases where I didn't need a single cable. 5 years ago I would have been rushing out to Radio Shack to get all sorts of things to be able to use these devices. The X41 gets its power via a USB cable that goes to your xbox (or it can be run to a PC or an outlet with AC to USB adapter. This was also a very welcomed feature because I live in an old house with limited outlets. USB power is always nice.

The x41 can also be setup using the red and white component audio jacks, so if you're not using optical cables, you're still in good shape. The base unit has a second headphone jack, so if you've got a friend over and you're playing split screen you both can experience sound isolation at the same time using the same device. Obviously, the quality of the second connection can only be determined by the headphones you choose to use. I don't believe it will work with xbox live voice chat either, but I have not tested it, so I can't say. I think it's a nice feature regardless. How many people are living in close proximity to others who want to avoid disturbing everyone else but still want to enjoy their games... even if they have a friend playing with them? I wouldn't think that group would be so large if it wasn't for all the split screen-ers I've seen on Left4Dead2 recently... but I digress.

The first game I played with my new x41s was Battlefield Bad Company 2. My first impression was... this is exactly the same as what I had before. After all the hype I heard from all the people I knew with Turtle Beach headsets I was expecting a whole new world of audio clarity. What I got was... the same as what I had... which was an amazing world of audio clarity. What I lost was earth shattering bass and an open and airy atmosphere that feels like it's full of life. What I gained was the ability to have a very similar experience to what I had without waking my wife up every time I fired the main gun of a bradley.

Was I disappointed? Yeah... a little. I didn't really know how good I had it until I heard what everyone was doing back flips over. It was exactly the same...

or was it?

X41s after a month of gaming

So, after the initial buyers remorse cooled off I started realizing that I was doing something I'd never done before... played it LOUD. I was able to crank the volume in the middle of the night and hear every last sound in crystal clear 5.1 as if it was going on around me. I also changed the sound settings in Battlefield Bad Company 2 from "War Tapes" to "Headphones" after I realized they weren't talking about a the old $10 headphones that your laptop is talking about when you change THOSE settings to headphones. Now, my wife was sleeping soundly and I was gaming at full throttle experiencing the things that I'd missed for so many years.

All of a sudden I started realizing little sounds I had missed. There were little pieces of audio "flair" that I never heard before. There were nuances to all the games I play that I had never even realized before that were bringing my gaming experience to a whole new level. I started appreciating the fact that the voice chat is in both ears. It actually increased the immersion level of the game when I could hear people just as I would in real life... in BOTH ears (now if xbox had the voice in 5.1 and I could tell WHERE a dude was talking to me from... a man can dream). I started noticing that the voice chat was being boosted during loud sequences in game preventing the much needed intel from being lost in the mix. I started really loving my headset without even knowing it.

The only quirk to this whole process and really... the only true "con" to this head set is that there is absolutely ZERO notification that the batteries are near death. Luckily, I was playing single player when the first set of included batteries died (after 10 or so game hours) and I was able to pause and replace them with the first set of Duracell rechargeable batteries. I figured they'd die in another 10 or so hours, but I was wrong. They lasted over 20 game hours! The only problem was that I was in the middle of a L4D2 round of Scavenge and suddenly had no xbox live voice chat, no game audio, no nothing. I had packed away my old xbox live headset, so I decided it was time to try my NASCAR pit crew skills. You don't realize how important 30 seconds are until you have your controller down and are trying to carefully insert batteries into your headset while your teammates are being smoked, pummeled, ridden, etc. I had some angry dudes on my team after that one.

From that battery death on what I've found works the best is to click the power button on the headset, report quickly that your headset batteries are dead and that you're going to change them after the round (you normally can get 5 or so seconds even if they just shut off on you), and then do your best without any sound until the round is over (or you have a long respawn time, etc).

I don't even know if I want to call this a "con" because I would hate for Turtle Beach to add a "your cell phone is going to die in 1 hour beep" to the headset. I'm not really sure what the best situation would be. It probably would be nice to have a warning light on the base unit when you're under 5 minutes of charge... but it's a small price to pay to be able to play it loud without disturbing anyone.

Comfort vs The Marathon Session

I had the night off and decided that I'd run the x41s through the comfort gauntlet that is a showing of Avatar followed by a 10 hour gaming session. I chose a long movie because I wanted to see if I could lean back in my recliner with my hands behind my head and enjoy a movie just as I would with my surround sound. I wear a 7 7/8ths fitted hat and a XXL motorcycle helmet, so I must extend the earpieces to maximum length to center them on my ears... but I can... so that's a huge plus. The boom mic could be a bit longer, but it is very adjustable. I just have to be careful that I keep it close to the side of my mouth because it doesn't reach far enough to go in front of my mouth (which I would prefer... but when you've got an Easter Island style head you take what you can get). I do occasionally get the complaint that I sound far away, but that's corrected by adjusting the boom.

The movie sounded great. The headset is light and comfortable, but I did become aware of it a few times when I'd turn my head and bump a speaker. I didn't feel I needed to adjust it at all during the movie, so I give the x41 an A+ for the movie experience.

Then came Left4Dead2 and the marathon gaming session. I wasn't aware of the headset until about hour 5 when I felt a little ear fatigue and needed to move the headset forward on my head. The earphones don't squeeze your head at all, but having them in the same place while you're frantically playing games and getting heated (in a warm room) tends to get slightly uncomfortable after multiple hours.

From hour 5 on I found myself adjusting them a little after each round or taking them off to let my ears cool off a bit while everyone was taking a bathroom break in between campaigns. They were still comfortable, but a little adjustment kept them feeling fresh.

It wasn't until hour 9+ that I started getting a little tired of having the x41s on my head. The room I'm in isn't cool enough to run an xbox360, PC, and plasma TV for double digit hours. I'm confident that I would have been no more comfortable using the standard xbox live headset for that long in my game room. It just got too hot to have something on your head.

All in all the x41s were extremely comfortable and I did not expect to make it the whole night without any complaints. What discomfort I felt was minor and more attributed to the weak AC unit than the headset itself. For such high quality sound with top notch sound isolation you can't find a more comfortable headset... even when using them for 12 hours at a time. There was a time long long ago when I was quite the audiophile and used a set of $500 headphones to listen to music. I ended up selling them to a friend of mine after a few months because I simply hated the way they felt on my head. I was ready to say the same of the x41s... but Turtle Beach knows what they are doing and did a wonderful job making these functional and comfortable. A Freaken Plus.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts (aka the tl;dr version)

Turtle Beach knows gaming. They know what you want and they give it to you in a package that's unbelievably easy to setup and use that's powerful enough to rival the best 5.1 surround sound systems money can buy while being comfortable enough to outlast the longest gaming sessions. If you have a top of the line surround sound system, you're not going to notice a difference when it comes to sound quality or directional awareness, but you will hear all the little sounds and all the finer points you've missed. Most importantly, you get to game in a world of earth shattering sound without making everyone around you hate your guts.