Building on the success of the popular Tritton AX 720, Mad Catz has recently announced an update dubbed the Tritton 720+. The 720+ maintains the strong list of gamer-oriented features from the old model, including circumaural ear cups, selectable voice monitoring (allows wearer to hear your own voice pumped into the headset from the mic), 7.1 dolby surround sound, a removable mic, and a fancy digital Dolby decoder to handle the 7.1 surround sound processing. It of course maintains the standard breakout controls for audio, such as mic mute and separate volume controls for game and voice (does not apply to PC, obviously).
Having said all that, the differences may seem small, but could make a world of difference. To start with, the physical design has been slightly updated to include a flexible mic, and is supposedly lighter and more comfortable for long play sessions.
More importantly, the drivers for the speakers have jumped in size from 40mm to 50mm. Most importantly of all however, the Dolby sound chip that does the 7.1 decoding has been updated, and now even includes a handy equalizer.
The ear cups do indeed look quite large and comfy, and the head rest seems thoroughly padded
Fancy 7.1 (or even 5.1 before that) setups have long been a prohibitively expensive and spacious. Even with enough money and space to burn, you have to have a reasonable room to set up all of the speakers, lest you end up with speakers sitting in the middle of your floor. Since being able to hear the exact direction of all sounds is a massive advantage in games, many a poor gamer has envied this ability, and thus the surround sound headset was born. One good way to mimic having speakers around your room is to simply make a very precise speaker capable of producing sound waves in such a method/direction that it sounds to your ear as though it’s coming from a specific direction. The proximity of this speaker to your ear is what really makes this feasible. While many sound drivers allow this functionality to be enabled from the driver panel, the fact that it is designed to work with any headset often makes this implementation less than perfect. Tailoring an implementation to a specific headset is what has lead to the most success thus far.
In order to do this however, a headset needs to do its own audio processing, essentially requiring it to be bundled with its own sound card. Mad Catz has embraced this by using this audio processing/sound card box to house things like volume and extra ports, and even an equalizer for this newest model. This ‘external sound card’ means that the 720+ is designed to connect to your computer digitally, and will essentially circumvent your own sound card for all sound coming through it, as it must do all audio processing itself. This means you will want a digital out such as TOSLINK or S/PDIF from your sound card in order to use the 720+. Having a brand spanking new Dolby audio decoder, along with the upgraded speaker drivers can turn a lackluster 7.1 surround sound implementation into a superb one. While I’ve never used the original AX 720, it has very positive reviews, and I would be eager to see if these improvements take the headset even further.
As a side note, of the surround sound headsets I have used, one of the biggest criticisms I have had (along with many other people) has been the lackluster sound when not in surround sound mode. The pattern seems to be the better and more accurate the surround sound in a game, the worse your average movie/music track sounds. When you’re paying $100-$200 for a headset, it would be nice to be able to switch from a game to a sweet movie, and be able to thoroughly enjoy deep, engrossing sound for both. It can be difficult to make the headset that versatile given you have to bundle a sound card into a little box, but perhaps the Tritton 720+’s built in equalizer could take a few steps in the right direction by allowing games and movies to overcome any sound bias built into the headset in order to make the surround sound better.
The Tritton 720+ is available for pre-order for $149.99.
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