Setup, Design & Observations
As the MasterPulse PRO is driverless, all that is needed from your system is a spare USB 2.0 port. Once the proprietary drivers have installed, you will be ready to go.
The remote control offers various features, including being able to select LED colour from, Spectrum cycle, red, yellow, green, light blue, deep blue, pink/purple, white, or you can turn the LED lighting off. There are 3+1 EQ modes, including Flat (LED OFF), Bass+ (RED), middle+ (BLUE) and treble+ (PINK). The inline remote is rather large and feels rather cheaply made with no ergonomic considerations at all. It does feature a clip on the back should you wish to fix it to an article of clothing, however I found that its shape and positioning made it very awkward to use. Even worse, it is very easy to get confused as to which switch does what while in game.
The overall construction of the headset is very good, with parts feeling very robust and of high quality, though this also makes the headset feel rather heavy, our scales put it at around 380g. We picked up on the use of the ribbon cable previous, stating that many would prefer a braided cable, but it would have been nice to have seen a removable cable too, with the headset itself ending with a 4pole jack that can be supplied with a USB DSP for virtual surround. This would drastically improve the versatility of the MasterPulse PRO headset.
On wearing the headset, we found that the clamping force is rather high, causing fatigue rather quickly, combined with the relatively firm padding, we found it quite unforgiving, some may want larger ear-holes too. The upside of this is that the noise isolation is very good and there is minimal sound leakage.
Multimedia
Listening to music was fairly enjoyable, but the mid-tones sounded rather muted, creating an almost tinny or compressed sound. The preset equalisers gave various options to change this, but we found the the bass went from negligible to muddy with no in-between. The blue preset sounded the best while listening to various tracks from electronic music to heavy rock and it was slightly improved by removing the side-panels. The bass improvement is very subtle, but it works.
In game, we found that the virtual surround mode widened the audio, sounding a little like added reverb, while boosting the already rather-loud volume level. Though the directional awareness wasn't really improved outside of what you would expect from a stereo headset and so it seems to be software-emulating the soundstage of what some headsets would naturally have anyway. By toggling between v7.1 modes and the various built in EQ, there are settings that provide a good gaming experience.
Microphone
Having an internal microphone is an interesting and great solution that answers that ever problem of a pesky microphone boom. The voice sounds a little deep, and muted, but is otherwise clear audible in various VOIP applications. Though, as there is no software driver, it suffers from noise leakage from whatever you are listening to, and clearly picks up various background noises. A little noise filtering could take this microphone a long way.
As the MasterPulse PRO is driverless, all that is needed from your system is a spare USB 2.0 port. Once the proprietary drivers have installed, you will be ready to go.
The remote control offers various features, including being able to select LED colour from, Spectrum cycle, red, yellow, green, light blue, deep blue, pink/purple, white, or you can turn the LED lighting off. There are 3+1 EQ modes, including Flat (LED OFF), Bass+ (RED), middle+ (BLUE) and treble+ (PINK). The inline remote is rather large and feels rather cheaply made with no ergonomic considerations at all. It does feature a clip on the back should you wish to fix it to an article of clothing, however I found that its shape and positioning made it very awkward to use. Even worse, it is very easy to get confused as to which switch does what while in game.
The overall construction of the headset is very good, with parts feeling very robust and of high quality, though this also makes the headset feel rather heavy, our scales put it at around 380g. We picked up on the use of the ribbon cable previous, stating that many would prefer a braided cable, but it would have been nice to have seen a removable cable too, with the headset itself ending with a 4pole jack that can be supplied with a USB DSP for virtual surround. This would drastically improve the versatility of the MasterPulse PRO headset.
On wearing the headset, we found that the clamping force is rather high, causing fatigue rather quickly, combined with the relatively firm padding, we found it quite unforgiving, some may want larger ear-holes too. The upside of this is that the noise isolation is very good and there is minimal sound leakage.
Multimedia
Listening to music was fairly enjoyable, but the mid-tones sounded rather muted, creating an almost tinny or compressed sound. The preset equalisers gave various options to change this, but we found the the bass went from negligible to muddy with no in-between. The blue preset sounded the best while listening to various tracks from electronic music to heavy rock and it was slightly improved by removing the side-panels. The bass improvement is very subtle, but it works.
In game, we found that the virtual surround mode widened the audio, sounding a little like added reverb, while boosting the already rather-loud volume level. Though the directional awareness wasn't really improved outside of what you would expect from a stereo headset and so it seems to be software-emulating the soundstage of what some headsets would naturally have anyway. By toggling between v7.1 modes and the various built in EQ, there are settings that provide a good gaming experience.
Microphone
Having an internal microphone is an interesting and great solution that answers that ever problem of a pesky microphone boom. The voice sounds a little deep, and muted, but is otherwise clear audible in various VOIP applications. Though, as there is no software driver, it suffers from noise leakage from whatever you are listening to, and clearly picks up various background noises. A little noise filtering could take this microphone a long way.
