Don't buy a gaming headset. Get these instead! - Audio Technica ATH M50xSTS

you've probably heard us say on this channel that instead of buying a gaming headset you should just buy a good music headphone and add a microphone but what if somebody did that for you well that's what Audio Technica did with their new m50x STS USB and non-usb headphones you just took a good music headphone and you slap a mic on it boom it's done it's good it's great it's gonna be great or is it that's what we're about to find out both of these headphones are based on the Audio Technica m50xs which is a very well respected and very popular headphone I'm wearing it right now see David's using them we use them on the WAN show they're good headphones it seems like as long as they put a good microphone on here it's a swing and a hit as I said there's two different models we have a USB version and a non-usb version which allows you to have a 3.5 millimeter plug a quarter inch plug or an XLR plug so you can basically plug this into whatever audio interface you already have set up this is gonna be a great option for streamers and you can hit the ground running for 45 millimeter drivers microphone mute yes condenser microphone a USB output and a collapsible portable design inside the box we have a pair of spare ear pads I like to see it and inside that's about it decent length for cable your wingspan is roughly your height so I'm about six one oh well this is making me look like I'm five eight but I swear I'm six feet date me and you get a USB a and there's the USBC adapter that is a very skinny look at how little uh material is outside of the actual Port there and having this adapter means that this cable must be permanently attached that's a actually really a bummer because you can replace the cable on the m50xs thank you this is a pair that we just had at work they're David's they twist out and there you can switch them it is a proprietary connector which is kind of a bummer but at least it's a swappable well they got a short a long and a coiled one but what's weird is that on this box there's two plugs an XLR plug and that says that there's a quarter inch adapter so what's going on in this one that's unexpected there's the adapter okay no I so I get the logic here because usually a lot of streamers will interface you plug this into their interface right you'll have your go XLR or whatever and you'll have a cable for your headphones and a cable for your microphone and you plug them into that it's just a little weird compared to the Simplicity of the USB cable let's take a look around you have a leatherette headband with minimal padding but they're also very light you have a ratchet adjustment on the side out of the box they come with a breathable nylon for the ear cup that's also a fake leather outside whereas typically they just give you these pleather pads I found the m50xs to get pretty warm pretty quickly I don't personally find them to be a very comfortable headset though some people can wear them all day your mileage may vary we have a monitor volume plus and minus I imagine this is for your side tone that's where you can hear yourself speak through your own headphones it says push to Monitor and then you can turn the volume up or down that's actually a really nice addition because sometimes headphones come with it and you can only turn it on and off and I like the look of the microphone I like how it's got a metal Grille on it it reminds me of like an old tiny microphone so it's flipped to mute labeled right there where you got to go past it there's also a distinct click it's a pretty simple all-in-one solution and as much as we can bemoan the lack of features if it does the things it wants to do really well which is play music and put sound in other people's ear good stuff and we'll find out how good they do after I tell you a little secret a secret lab thanks to secret lab for sponsoring this video secret lab chairs are designed to keep you comfortable for those long nights of work and play their Titan Evo 2022 series chair offers four-way lumbar support comes with a magnetic memory foam head pillow and is offered in different upholsteries like hybrid leatherette softwave Fabric and Napa leather best of all a five-year extended warranty is included along with a 49-day return policy head to the link in the description to check out secret lab today about a bing bada boom the drivers are immediately recognized setting itself up I will say that this is kind of long this whole situation I think what would have been nice is if they included the adapter on here as like if it was attached you know with a little thing of rubber so you could just take it off or on and you won't because you're gonna lose this you're gonna plug into the other port and I immediately hear the side tone coming in so I can hear myself talking again I can adjust it with the side buttons I can make it louder oh and it has a nice beat um and now I have no side Channel or I can just turn it off I can turn it back on I'm going to have it on because it helps me I can't adjust the volume on my computer with it just for the side tone audio wise in terms of listening they sound the same it is a pair of Audio Technica m50xs the microphone itself we're going to do a quick little recording here this is a test recording to hear the sound of the Audio Technica m50x sts-usb and it is pretty quiet right now you'd have to kind of bump this up a little bit in terms of volume now let's do a sinful scissor sip to snifter seized his knees and sneezed foreign to sit in solemn silence in a dull dark dock in a pestilential prison with a lifelong lock awaiting the sensation of a short sharp shock from a cheap and Chippy Chopper on a big black block cool let's take a listen wow okay this sounds this is a really really good microphone no setup raw into audacity I didn't do anything I didn't adjust it obviously if you want to use this you can just adjust some of the settings especially from the mouth like I think I was peeking a little bit because it was a little bit close to my mouth but like that's really really really good microphone for a headset this would be amazing for streaming like it's an easy easy mic setup it worked out of the box really well and with just a few minor tweaks you can make it sound really really quite good in terms of audio quality I'm not gonna spend a ton of time talking about the Audio Technica m50x's audio quality there's so many opinions out there on it for me they're a little bit Bassy and boomy they don't have the same kind of punch that I usually want but they do have a great amount of like energy in the bass that makes a lot of music very very fun to listen to they don't have the highest treble extension nor are they the most resolving in terms of details but like 95 of what you play on these is gonna sound great if this is your first step into the entry level audio file area with high quality headphones you're gonna love these they just they're great there's a reason they're so highly recommended and so widespread all right is there a little bit of overhype on them yeah but like they're an easy recommend you can always get them they sound good um these are aimed at streamers and what do streamers do a lot of gaming so how are they as a gaming headset let's play a game positionality and Sound Stage are fine like I wouldn't go to this headset exactly if you're aiming for the most Competitive Gaming experience um but like it is pretty good but you're not gonna you're not able to take advantage of anything like virtual surround sound like there's no DTS support or Dolby Atmos kind of stuff it's just a stereo headset so you're at the uh you're the will of how well designed the sound engine is but it's not bad you could get better positional audio and soundstage with an open back but you have to deal with all of the caveats of having an open back headphone like you know bleed speaking of which these are decent at not letting sound in they don't have any sort of active noise canceling so you're still gonna hear a lot of higher like or you're still gonna hear a lot of like the mid-sounds like human voices and stuff through them but that's just all my opinions I'm not some sort of robot or machine that's specifically designed to objectively measure headphones and tell you exactly how they might sound that's what the labs is for so let's take a look at damn charts something to note is that you can get two different sets of pads and since they are of different materials they do affect the sound so using the nylon headsets we can see right here that this is a Bassy headphone look at that bump at 300 Hertz and Below against our Target huge bump but it lacks a bit of The Rumble in the sub bass and because it's the base shelf is being applied at the 300 Hertz mark it sounds boomier than like rumbly and it lacks a little bit of punch and Nuance but as you can see in the mids it follows the curve very nicely and it's a little bit of a mellower treble sound there's some peaks in the really high Brilliance area but if we're looking at the upper mids and the presence section of the graph you will find that these will be a little bit relaxed which is why people tend to say that they're not the most detailed and then if we look at the leather it's a pretty big difference we lose a lot of that elevated boomy bass and it becomes a little bit tighter with a greater dip just above 300 in the low mids to my ears that dip in the mids is not as noticeable as this chart might make it look and then we see that the treble response isn't touched too much between the two materials with maybe that dip at five to six K but still it's a pretty good sounding headphone with a little bit of color to it and a relaxed upper end so it's never going to be fatiguing or tiring here is our isolation chart so how well it blocks out other sounds what you're looking at is that zero line that's zero DBS of reduction go as we go further negative we're seeing a greater and greater reduction even with both pads reduction is really only in the high end stuff stuff like active noise canceling helps out big time in these mids and reduces kind of the uh vibration or the Resonance of voices and it can block stuff out but these don't have any of that so you don't get it and then here's the mic response as you can see very very good it's unlike our headphone curve the microphone Target is a flat line why is that because we're looking at a compensated graph so the target for microphones is totally industry standard and agreed upon whereas when we're talking about headphones the jury's still out on what the headphone Target is so there's different machines for measuring and all that stuff but everyone in the industry agrees that microphones should sound a certain way you'll notice that the bomb there's a big roll-off sub 100 Hertz that doesn't really matter for a microphone that's designed for the human voice and actually can be a benefit because you won't hear like any ambient rumbles so like that's a solid microphone that's a great microphone that you can use for anything and you can trust that it's giving a very very accurate reproduction of what you are actually sounding like the price of the ath m50x the normal not headset version is 169. so what kind of a premium is audio Technic attacking on to the microphone clad headsets well if you buy the USB version it comes to a whopping price of 229 so that's a 60 premium over the normal ones the XLR version it comes in at just two hundred dollars you don't really get a lot extra as well as there's some sacrifices that I think that just didn't need to make and I wish that they didn't interchangeable cables maybe a removable microphone just making these more versatile would be better well really would have been cool is if they just sold these at the 230 dollar price point and gave me interchangeable cable so I just got the XLR cable and the USB cable that would have been a way better solution and I'm really sad that they didn't go with that because I think that these justify their price at least brand new but if you want something that has that's far more feature Rich that has multi-channel support spatial audio and integrated EQ look at the steelseries arctis Nova Pro which comes in at just 224 on Amazon right now it might not sound as good as this but it's a lot a lot of Creature Comforts the other cool thing what if you bought a pair of these by themselves and then maybe added an additional microphone well they've put in a really really good mic and I think the mic that they have attached here makes this a really good value think about the antline mod mic which you can like tape to any headset you want actually the mod mic uni uses this exact headphone on their product page to display it but if you want the mod mic and the adapter for USB that's going to cost you 93 bucks so this undercuts that by about 30 to 40 dollars which is really good at the end of the day Audio Technica has created a great headset for gamers whose highest priority is great audio in both mic and headphone I can highly recommend great good job thanks for watching if you like this video why don't you check out another video on the drop plus epochs h3x they're another headphone that's just focused on doing the basics and they come in at a much cheaper price it's worth checking out

Channel: ShortCircuit

Views: 487,956

Keywords: shortcircuit, SC, unboxing, first impression, tech, gadget, home, fun, buy

Id: ZsDYrcNkQYc

Length: 12min 39sec (759 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 07 2023