Turtle Beach Ear Force X42 Headset Review

Turtle Beach Ear Force X42 Headset Review – You’ll Love This Sound!

If you’re a serious gamer then you know how much better your gaming experience is with great sound.

Unfortunately it’s not always possible to have full on 5.1 Dolby surround sound in the middle of the night when other normal people are trying to sleep. Enter the Turtle Beach Ear Force X42 headset to the rescue.

The idea behind how these headphones are going to give you the most realistic gaming experience has to do with how our brain hears sound and judges where it is coming from.

Although it seems a bit far-fetched to think that just two speakers can reproduce sounds “behind” you, the guys over at Turtle Beach say it is very possible.

In the article by Caleb Denison, a writer at digitaltrends he states that the X42 headset comes really close to delivering on its promise.

Features & Design

The X42 maintain Turtle Beach’s easy-breathing and amply padded ear cups and headband, magnum-sized 50mm drivers and boom-style microphone with windscreen…

..Though the wireless transmitter for the X42 has to accommodate additional circuitry for digital input and surround sound processing, the transmitter box itself isn’t much larger than the X31’s. This makes tucking the transmitter away similarly easy. Power is fed to the transmitter by way of a USB cable.

The frequency used in the headphones operates on wireless frequencies that are less likely to interfere with other electronics in your immediate area. This would of course depend on what type of interference is around, such as a operating microwave oven or a flux capacitor.

So how is this set supposed to work to give you a better gaming experience?

In addition to EQ presets for bass boost only, treble boost only and bass and treble boost combo, the X42 offers additional sound customization by way of six different surround angle settings. The idea here is to change the way the headphones deliver sound in a manner similar to changing a speaker system’s physical relationship to the listener

As you would expect, the best sounds are going to be found with some manipulation. There is a separate transmitter box with various settings that you will have to mess with to get just the right sound. turtle beach dolby surround sound

Setup

To get the X42 transmitter box up and running, a digital optical cable (provided) must be run from the source (most likely an Xbox 360) to the transmitter.

Depending on whether you have an old Xbox or a newer one may be the difference between an easy setup and a bit more of a difficult one. In the newer models you will be able to use the optical connection on the back of the console to hook up to the transmitter.

If you have an older model, it will be a bit more involved. There is a provided component-A/V dongle that should do the trick, but just in case you are using HDMI cables, you will want to check with Turtle Beach to purchase an extra smaller dongle to fit instead.

How It Sounds

To test the X42, we used a combination of music on a DVD-Audio disc coded in Dolby Digital 5.1 surround, a handful of Dolby Digital 5.1 movie clips on DVD and, of course, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 for a first-person shooter perspective as well as Fallout: New Vegas.

We assumed the X42 would offer the same great stereo sound quality we’ve come to expect from Turtle Beach’s line of amplified headphones and we were not disappointed. A quick listen to some stereo music clips revealed that the X42 performed just like X32 in this regard. By the way: we still prefer bass-boost only and no sound expansion for general music listening.

It was also noted that during the test as they guys walked around testing out the range of the wireless signal, that it was better than that of the x32 and operated without any abnormal buzzing or excess (unwanted) noise.

There’s no doubt that the surround sound processor in the X42 does something and we’ll even go so far as to say that it does add a more immersive, three-dimensional feel to the gaming experience, but what we were hoping for –easily locatable sound queues within a 360-degree soundfield– isn’t exactly what we got.

The test revealed that in-game noises could be easily identified as coming from the sides or in front, but any sound coming from behind the testers seemed to come from the sides as well, or even in front.

Basically, this means that while the sound was impressive, it didn’t quite match true 5.1 surround that you would get from 5+ speakers strategically placed in a room.

Final Thoughts

If you have the opportunity to use Dolby 5.1 surround, you are going to get more of a realistic experience, which is to be expected. But if you are looking for a 2-speaker system that is going to blow your ears away with great technology packed into a small space that really delivers, this Turtle Beach Ear Force X42 Headset review suggests that you will not be disappointed one bit.