What is the Turtle Beach Stealth 700?
Launched alongside its extra reasonably priced sibling, the Stealth 600, Turtle Beach has produced a brand new wi-fi gaming headset for each Xbox One and PlayStation 4. Despite its respectable characteristic set, it nonetheless is available in at underneath £130.
The largest hook is the Stealth 700’s promise of encompass sound, energetic noise cancellation and the inclusion of Turtle Beach’s personal Superhuman Hearing know-how. However, it additionally boasts a wealth of extra EQ presets with assist for PC, cellular and VR techniques alongside.
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Turtle Beach Stealth 700 – Design, construct and options
The Stealth 700 affords a sturdy construct that’s primarily hewn from sturdy, versatile black plastic. It options a mixture of textures and finishes that may look slightly messy in locations. On the sleek, polished diagonal banding throughout the outer face of every ear cup, particularly, fingerprints adhere all too simply.
There’s a contact of color at play on each the perimeters and insignias of every ear cup. Despite gaming hardware’s typical propensity for flare, the Stealth 700 demonstrates stunning restraint in the case of aesthetics, guaranteeing you received’t be mistaken for an additional in a Shinjuku robotic café.
As for consolation, each the highest of the scarf and every ear cup pack in loads of foam padding, all of which is clad in faux-leather. Paired with the 700’s surprisingly light-weight body, they render prolonged gaming periods a cushty affair. The headband can increase to regulate even the most important of heads, whereas each ear cups rotate to permit simpler adjustment and repositioning when in use.
Turtle Beach has additionally employed its patented ProSpecs™ Glasses Relief System. This is actually a portion of softer foam within the upper-third of every ear pad, which flexes extra readily to permit for snug long-term use by those that put on glasses. It’s a welcome inclusion that extra competing headsets, significantly these within the console area, ought to think about adopting.
The left ear cup is the Stealth 700’s enterprise finish. It options all the hardware controls essential to entry the headset’s predominant capabilities, and all of its key ports too. Run your eyes alongside its underside and also you’ll spot a micro-USB port, used for each charging and firmware updates (a sticker connected to the headset suggests that you just verify for firmware updates by way of Turtle Beach’s desktop shopper earlier than first use).
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There’s additionally a regular 3.5mm headphone jack enter to accommodate wired connections to units akin to smartphones, however its inclusion can also be important to be used with the PlayStation VR’s 3D Audio capabilities, for instance, which merely received’t work over a wi-fi connection. The solely drawback is that Turtle Beach doesn’t embody a suitable 3.5mm cable within the field, so that you’ll must supply one your self in case you plan on utilizing the Stealth 700 wired.
Further up on the rear of the ear cup are two knurled quantity knobs: one for chat audio, and the opposite for recreation audio. Like the remainder of the Stealth 700’s hardware controls, each are tactile sufficient which you could find and function them reliably by way of contact alone.
The decrease half of the ear cup’s outer face options a big rubberised panel with three hardware buttons on it. The first is the Stealth 700’s energy key; the center button permits for pairing over Bluetooth; whereas the foremost button toggles the headset’s aforementioned Superhuman Hearing™ means. Like the quantity knobs, these too are simple sufficient to function by way of contact alone. However, the aid within the rubber is slightly too shallow and would have benefitted from bolder varieties with heavier embossing for larger tactility.
Turtle Beach has built-in a moderately ingenious mechanism into the Stealth 700’s omnidirectional microphone. It locks into three distinct positions, with the back-most cease disabling the microphone altogether. The center place briefly locations the microphone in a muted state, and the forward-most place prompts the microphone for in-game chat. Knocking between these varied factors is intuitive and easy, negating the necessity to hunt for a mute key in your PC, console or the headset itself.
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Depending on what you’re connecting it to, organising the Stealth 700 is a comparatively painless affair. It comes pre-paired to the USB wi-fi adapter with which it’s bundled (that is absent from the Xbox One model, which makes use of Microsoft’s Xbox Wireless protocol to pair with Xbox One consoles and suitable PCs instantly). You might need to manually change over the audio supply in your PC or PlayStation, however that’s about all that must be required to stand up and operating.
Turtle Beach’s Audio Hub cellular app is obtainable to obtain to permit fine-grain management over the Stealth 700’s settings and EQ. This features a vary of eight presets that you just wouldn’t readily know can be found in any other case. It isn’t essentially the most dependable app expertise, and the truth that that you must pair the Stealth 700 to your telephone to vary sure settings is slightly convoluted. Nevertheless, it’s good to know that it’s obtainable to customers.
After some prolonged gaming periods and a little bit of music and media playback thrown in for good measure, the Stealth 700’s promise of as much as 10 hours of battery life holds true. Charging up from empty takes round two to a few hours, and for comfort there’s a pulsing LED subsequent to the micro-USB port to let whenever you’ve topped the battery again up fully.
Turtle Beach Stealth 700 – Audio high quality
Stick the Stealth 700 on and also you’re in for a deal with. The 50mm drivers push out heat tones, with spectacular element and readability contemplating the headset’s mid-range standing. They produce a large sound, with an emphasis on the bass and treble. However, this does end in some particulars inside the mids turning into misplaced if utilizing the default recreation audio preset. Thankfully, there are different EQ modes on-hand to rebalance the sound as wanted.
As for the microphone, it produced blended outcomes. Whilst testing on PC (enjoying PUBG), there was at the least one criticism from somebody on the receiving finish claiming that it sounded too quiet, whereas at different occasions the readability of the audio captured was counseled by strangers unprompted.
Thankfully, the compliments and basic reward considerably outweighed any destructive responses. As such, it will seem that Turtle Beach has, for essentially the most half, completed its homework with reference to tuning the 700’s microphone know-how.
Jumping from PC to console (a PlayStation 4-compatible variant of the Stealth 700 was used for this evaluate), there have been a number of extra hiccups. For essentially the most half, the plug-and-play comfort discovered on the PC expertise transfers throughout to console, however the lag between the microphone monitoring that takes place when utilizing the optical connection is distracting sufficient that you just’ll need to roll the chat quantity knob all the best way down.
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Another concern is the Stealth 700’s waning reliability when you hear the “low battery” audio cue. At this level, the wi-fi connection breaks down nearly instantly, with the one answer to plug the headset again in, even earlier than energy is totally exhausted.
You shouldn’t expertise any points with the 700’s DTS Headphone:X 7.1 encompass assist, which provides actual depth to quite a few gaming situations, while the Superhuman Hearing characteristic is beneficial in video games akin to PUBG and Fortnite, the place sound cues are key. This is as long as you perceive that it destroys audio constancy by dropping out bass fully whereas pushing the mids and highs to the intense.
As for the Stealth 700’s claims of energetic noise cancellation, it does technically ship however the circumstances underneath which the characteristic operates are slightly… doubtful. Rather than extra standard headphones with noise cancellation – such because the Bose QC35 IIs – that use built-in microphones to suppress ambient noise by pushing an inverse waveform into your ears, Turtle Beach’s headset affords mic monitoring by default.
It’s a characteristic that’s supreme for gaming, guaranteeing you may hear what you’re saying clearly by means of the headphones, simply as your teammates can. However, switching on ANC on the Stealth 700 is actually disabling this monitoring characteristic, slicing out any ambient noise that might in any other case be picked up by the microphone, whereas on the similar time eradicating the flexibility to listen to your individual voice.
Why purchase the Turtle Beach Stealth 700?
There’s a lot to love concerning the Stealth 700’s characteristic set, to not point out the truth that it prioritises substance over type with out wanting too low cost or nasty. However, whether or not or not it stands as a worthwhile buy will rely upon the platforms you recreation on.
If you’re on the lookout for an honest wi-fi headset for console gaming solely, then regardless of the wealthy sound and EQ choices the 700 affords, its reliability must be referred to as into query.
For VR, cellular and/or PC gaming it turns into a extra engaging proposition, because it’s basically extra snug and dependable on these platforms than the one for which it’s being touted.