Setup, Design & Observations
The Raptor HS40 is mostly glossy black plastic which feels light yet durable. Upon wearing the headset, we found that the clamping force was firm but not overly so, enough to cut out a lot of external noise. The soft padding on the ear cups are comfortable but annoyingly they do not surround your ears, rather, squished them like a giant, over-sized on-ear headset. Though the ear padding is soft, it didn't make up for the diminishing comfort over time and found myself readjusting the headset repeatedly trying to find that ideal comfort zone, once found, the comfort issue is fine, but inconsistent. The mic isn't as flexible as many would like but should do the trick nicely. Moving down to the inline remote, it seemed a little too close to the headset for easy use. Overall it was simple to set up, plug into a USB port, download and install drivers, all is well.



Multi-Media
Interested to see how well the HS40 handles music, I started with a selection of electronic music from Blackmill and Rameses B and was greeted by a powerful bass intent on vibrating my eyeballs out, combined with clear mids and decent highs it was fairly enjoyable. Mixing it up with some acoustic rock supplied by Tori Amos, the bass was overly prominent competing with the vocals while pushing guitar and piano to the background.

Running through on Battlefield 4, the bass made for intense action, gunfire, explosions and collateral damage sounded awesome, exciting and heart racing. Testing with the 7.1 mode activated and adjusting the sound options accordingly, I found it difficult to sense any directional advantage. The Virtual surround did seem to work in more obvious situations but no better than how one would expect stereo headphones to respond, moreover, the audio quality sank into a large pit of despair, one lined with recycled toilet floor tiles (that were never washed), so a lot of echo was noticed. In summary, the audio definitely caters well for gaming audio, but give the virtual surround a miss.

Microphone
The microphone when at max sensitivity was very sensitive and caused a lot of reverberation as well as picking up a lot of environmental noise which made conversation impossible, at 50% sensitivity, the microphone worked well but still picked up a lot of background noise while performing best when set between 20-30% sensitivity. Once under control, it worked well in game and in voice conversations via Skype and Team Speak.