If you’re in the market for anew headset for your Playstation 4 then you’ll be spoilt for choice. Just a quick look round will bring up options ranging from £20 all the way up to ten times that, but if you’re on a budget then you’ll always need to sacrifice some quality. Snakebyte are looking to change that, with their new lines of headsets aimed at PS4 players (this Head:Set 4) and Xbox One gamers (the Head:Set X) already available at around the £15 mark on Amazon – that’s a very very low price, so where does it sit in terms of quality?
Well that depends on what you’re looking for, and what you’re comparing it to. It’s unfair to compare this to top end HyperX headsets; they’re aimed at different audiences, they’re at opposite ends of the price spectrum, and nobody is going to be weighing them up against each other. If you’re after a very cheap headset that does a decent job without making your wallet have a fit, this might not be a bad job. It’s not perfect at all, but it’s great value for money.
First impressions of receiving this headset for review were ones of confusion. The box was tiny, so much so I wasn’t certain that it was even the headset that had been delivered. But sure enough, inside was a very neatly and cleverly folded headset with a detachable microphone and solid looking Playstation-blue cable and headband. It’s easy to see the appeal of this headset: it’s ideal for travelling around. Being able to fold it up to almost nothing is great, and the fact it uses a 3.5mm headphone plug means that it’ll also work on (most) phones and handheld consoles too, which is pretty handy. They feel ok to hold, you can tell there are cheaper plastics being used here to shave the costs off, but for what you’re paying they certainly don’t feel bargain basement.
That’s all very well and good, but what do they sound like? Well, not bad actually, certainly better than you’d expect from a £15 headset. The headphones sit on your ears as opposed to totally surrounding them, which I found a bit odd being so used to full over-ear headphones, but they were comfortable enough over a long period of gaming and kept the old problem of sweaty ears to a minimum. There a fair bit of noise escaping into the room which is to be expected with this style of headphone, and while that could be an issue if there are other people in the room being distracted by it, the likelihood is you won’t need to worry about that and can crank up the volume and receive the surprisingly grunty noises offered up by the Head:Set 4.
The microphone sits nicely, but didn’t seem to give the best sound according to those I gamed with. Nowadays you can pretty much expect crystal clear comms in most games you play, and while other players’ voices came across to me clearly enough the quality of what others heard wasn’t as amazing, with my usual slightly gruff bassy voice losing a lot of its oomph and sounding a bit tinny and distant. Again, for the price it’s still decent enough, but it’s worth keeping in mind that low cost or not, the overall sound quality isn’t what you’d get from other headsets on the market.
So can we recommend the Snakebyte Head:Set 4? Yes, absolutely, as long as you’re only looking for a cheap headset to be able to play into the night without keeping everyone awake and want a way to talk to other players without spending more than you would on the console itself. But if you want to get the most out of your games you’ll want something with bigger headphones, a better quality microphone and maybe even surround sound. You can tell the Head:Set 4 is a budget headset, but ultimately that’s what some people are after, and those people can do far worse than grabbing one of these.
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