X41 turtle beach headset(360).. 200 bucks for headphones?!?
They better give me a direct link to hearing god's word 200 bucks.
Meh, it's all relative.
Xbox headsets are a subject near and dear to my heart. Since I haven't given an update on my headset search, I will put it here.
My first upgrade was to the X31s. They're pretty good, and I still go back to them now and then when whatever I'm using breaks. However, I don't find them very comfortable, they are only stereo, and they do eat batteries (easily remedied by keeping some rechargeables on hand). Still, I find having all sound through the headset to be very valuable late at night, and Live chat works better through a solid set of headphones.
I got tired of some of the interference and other nagging issues with the X31s, so I continued my search. I avoided the Trittons - mostly because of Mongoose's experience with Live chat bleeding into the center channel. The Astros (A40s) were purported to be top of line around here (OMG $300 LOLROX!!!@!! - I didn't just speak to God, I kissed him!!@!@!). So I got those, and they were very nice - lots of inputs, surround sound (5.1) and very comfortable. But the microphone would quit working after about an hour. I went through a bunch of troubleshooting and trading parts back and forth, but I could never get them to work consistently, and Astro wasn't able to reproduce my problem. They ended up giving me a refund about 2 weeks ago (bought them in July). Tech support was long and painful (twss), but they were pleasant to deal with, and fair, and I got my refund.
So during that mess, I went with a pair of Sharkoons (
http://www.amazon.com/Sharkoon-X-Ta...QIC0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1288975306&sr=8-1) at the recommendation of Rugger, on here. I have been very pleased with them. Well made, great sound, great controls. They are wired and only accept a toslink connection, but that works for me - I kept the 25' toslink cord I got from Astro. One drawback is that the company is out of Thailand (or something), so good luck getting support. After about a week the little plastic clip popped out of the toslink port, so I couldn't connect to it. I contacted Amazon and they overnighted me a whole new set. Pretty amazing service. I haven't had any problems since then (and they are also PS3 compatible, but I need a really long USB cord).
One drawback is that I have several optical-enabled devices (PS3, DTV, XBOX, AppleTV) - I've put them all on a switch, but that doesn't seem to work with the headphones. I have a suspicion it's related to my extra long optical cable, but I haven't really fooled with it.
I will say that it is really nice having the 5.1 headset, and you CAN hear lots of stuff that you don't hear normally. I'm not sure having 7.1 is going to be a huge improvement over that, but it can't hurt. Having wireless would be nice, but it's also nice not having any issues with batteries or interference. The way my room is set up, the wires don't really present a problem.
Oh, and one other thing. Best Buy has a cheap turtle beach model (MX? or something) for about $20 or $30. I picked that up in Houston to check out, and it is TERRIBLE. Chat in one ear and game in the other. And the ear pieces got warm enough to burn my ears. And super uncomfortable. I returned them in a tangled mess the next day and Bestbuy didn't say anything. Just awful.
Whew.