Let’s skip the foreplay and get right down to business. The sound from the A40 headset is spectacular, crisp, undistorted, and somehow roomier than other gaming headsets. The positional effects are particularly fine, even at extremely high and low volumes, and for the first time I’ve got a headset I prefer to use over the 5.1 speaker system in my room. Ambient noise is screened out without game audio sounding crowded and undifferentiated.
Actually, with its external mixer/amplifier/Dolby Digital decoder box, the A40 is more like an audio system than a headset, and dig some of these features. The lightweight noise-canceling microphone can be attached to either side of the headset, and stays put no matter how much you thrash around. A prominent dial on the mixer controls the balance between game and voice audio. The mixer even allows you to connect an MP3 player to the audio stream and squirt your own soundtrack into your games (there’s even an optical input on the mixer, for heav’s sake).
I would have liked bass and treble dials on the control box, but that’s a minor quibble over the best thing that’s happened to my ears since Q-Tips.
