Turtle Beach Ear Force HPA

Posted 08/26/2005 at 12:03am | by

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We know good surround-sound headphones exist. We pitted models from Pioneer and Sony against each other in our May 2005 Head2Head and came away impressed with both contenders (Sony won the match by a nose). We’re much less taken with Turtle Beach’s effort.

Of course, we’re talking about two completely different price categories: Pioneer’s model SE-DIR800C sells for $400 and Sony’s model MDR-DS8000 fetches twice that. Turtle Beach’s Ear Force HPAs go for just $100.

Then again, the Pioneer and Sony products do a lot more—they’re both wireless and they both have surround-sound decoder modules, for example. Turtle Beach relies on your PC’s soundcard for signal processing, and these headphones keep you tethered to your source device.

Yeah, yeah, we know. Whadaya want for a hundred bucks? Well, we want headphones that sound good with games, movies, and music; that are comfortable to wear for long periods at a time; and that are rugged enough that we don’t have to worry about throwing them in a bag when we head off to a LAN party. The HPAs score well in only that last category, thanks to hefty materials and solid construction.

Unlike conventional headphones, the HPAs have three separate jacks to match a 5.1-channel soundcard. A separate adapter enables you to plug in speakers at the same time. To test the headphones, we plugged them into a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 soundcard and played games, movies, and DVD-Audio. The phones did a commendable job producing booming bass and tight midrange—critical to all three applications—but they had difficulty producing inspiring highs. Compared with both mid-priced loudspeakers and stereo headphones, high frequencies on the HPAs sounded muted and flat.

And when it comes to producing surround sound, the HPAs fall flat on their face. No matter how much we tweaked the inline amplifier’s separate volume controls for front, center, surround, and subwoofer channels, the HPAs never pulled off the trick of throwing audio events behind our heads. And if a surround-sound system can’t accomplish that, it just doesn’t deserve the designation.
—Michael Brown

Month Reviewed: October 2005
Verdict: 5
URL: www.turtlebeach.com