I wasn’t paid or asked by any of the companies featured below to write this. With that out of the way, let the gaming headphone rant begin.
The gaming headset market is saturated with great choices, and most of them are now wireless. Lossless audio, backup Bluetooth connections, solid noise-cancelling mics — these things all now show up in headsets that cost less than I ever thought they would. The ever-churning consumer tech race to the bottom has hit the proverbial bedrock, and competitors are now dwindling as they claw at each other for a stagnant growth-capped user base.
Outside of their need to chase infinite growth to satisfy investors, there’s one other big problem with gaming audio products. In spite of great strides in industrial design over the last ten years — most of them still look daft. They scream “gamer,” or “1980’s pilot,” or “person who needs more RGB lights for some reason.” Sony makes one of the most incredible gaming headsets I’ve used in two decades of writing game reviews in the Pulse Elite, yet it looks like it fell out of a cheap faux-retro discard pile. It’s all angles and plastic and gross lines, and anyone who has even a little bit of class or personal pride probably wouldn’t be caught dead wearing one outside a…