Wicked Cushion Freeze Pads for Turtle Beach Stealth Pro - Everything You Need To Know!

hey what's up everybody it's Joe from gaty Tech and I have a fun and pretty short video today because we're going to talk about the wicked cushion freeze pads for the Turtle Beach Stealth Pro one of my favorite wireless gaming headsets I've ever used I use it all the time so I am very familiar with these pads in fact one of them actually got damaged from one of my old uh headphone stands that I wasn't crazy about I nicked it and this is a really thin leatherette so it's not the most durable so um in this review I will have links in the description below to help save you some money it takes 15% off the pad if you decide you want to purchase it it does support the channel now I used to not accept any affiliate Kickbacks on these pads for like a year and a half because I really don't want my channel to be about you know making as much money as I can I just want to help people and be honest because I want you to see this channel as a trustworthy source so now that I've accepted some affiliate Revenue um from links that you purchase and uh or click and purchase from I wanted to share that to be fully honest and open now these pads aren't perfect there's going to be Pros and cons and I will say that in this video so please don't see that as a way for me to you know try to sell this to you necessarily um it won't change how I review anything but again I just want to be very honest and open so let's talk about pricing so the all black version is $29.95 and then the print version which is this geog gray is $31.95 you have the '90s black which is a really nice fun print uh '90s literally and that one's $31.95 they also have a black like camouflage print uh which I like I actually use that one a lot on some other models but I think this one the GE gray works for me so uh the discounts uh in the links below will take 50 15% off whichever one you purchase but by all means purchase it wherever you want so let's talk about the basics um I'm going to talk about why you would consider the pad and then I'll show you how to take it apart and switch them out because it's pretty straightforward so the stock pads I actually like um I haven't had an issue with the stock pad they they trap in all the sound so I have really good noise isolation they've been very comfortable for glasses that's why I have them out here I always use um I always test but I occasionally use blue light reduction yellow glasses from gunar so glasses important is still uh or glass's Comfort is still important for me and the stock pads were good because Turtle Beach has always had this like prospec advertising where they're very soft and supple however the one thing that you can't fix with this is because it's leatherette they don't breathe as well and after a while they get hot and that's been the number one cause of discomfort for people is the long-term gaming performance it gets a little spicy you have to kind of take them off especially because this has a relatively strong clamp Force so when you factor that in too it really becomes a breathability issue so you would consider the freeze pad primarily for breathability and looks just to be clear you if you want to just customize it this is still a good option the sound quality impact is minimal and I will show you the difference uh measured uh in terms of how this impacts the sound but as far as comfort goes the most immediate things I noticed when I put them on these pads are slightly stiffer than the stock ones only because the stock Turtle Beach pads are so squishy um you feel like this one's just a little bit more dense and a little bit more firm still very compliant this is an upgrade for a lot of other gaming headsets out there so it's nothing that these aren't good at necessarily but the other thing you notice is obviously as soon as it touches the skin it's a different material and this sport fabric material is slightly more scratchy it is a sport fabric I haven't had any issues with it it's just more breathable though so the biggest takeaway from this if you're considering a pad upgrade it's for the long-term gaming not the initial first 10-second feel but if you're playing games for two hours at a Time the wicked cushions has been a good upgrade for me I can wear the stealth longer without feeling like I have to pop it off of my ear and on the note of comfort because they didn't go too much thicker I'll show you the dimensions in a moment the clamp Force isn't drastically uh impacted as well it is little bit more firm feeling but not in a sense that I feel like I'm I'm just getting bare hugged like the stal 700 has an even stronger clamp force uh than this does with this pad so let's talk about how easy it is to take it off now you can use a butter knife if you're careful frankly if you have very strong fingernails or the edge of your finger you can actually pop this off without using any tools but I will tell you the first time you remove the pads the Stealth Pro uh pads are mounted very firmly once you get that initial break of the seal uh it's pretty easy after that so I'm using a plastic like little pry tool that comes in those electronics repair kits just because I like using plastic on plastic I'm less likely to scratch something and all I have to do is kind of wedge it in and work around so the reason why I'm taking this off is because I want to show you a couple things relatively painless right you will notice that there's a foam underneath with the hole that's for the active noise cancellation mic which is this little bump and and if you look at the stock pad let's get the ones that are an exact match so they mirrored they Wicked cushions have a very similar design approach to the stock pad there's no issues as far as mounting it goes and they even use the same foam inlay which means you have less of an impact on sound quality as well this is great to see cuz if they they could have just gone with a standard like acoustic fleece if you will or a sport fabric uh cover just to make the baffle look clean and it would have worked but it would have been a much harsher treble response which is like that sound so this preserves the stock sound quite a bit and it's labeled you can see the little L here and there's the L on this ear cup so all I have to do is place it back on you'll see tabs but honestly this little hole should tell you roughly where where it goes it's it's not too hard to line up and then you just have to push it on and that's it I got a few Pops in there and now I'm good to go it's nice and snug oh I missed one let's get that last one in there we go okay had to make sure that was a good seal you don't want it to be a loose seal because that can impact base if it's kind of flapping around but we're good to go now so um let's talk about Dimensions now because there is a slight change and I think most people will like this usually if the pad gets a little bit bigger it's it's typically just going to improve comfort so when we look at the stock pad let's go left and left again the stock pad has a height of just over 60 mm let's say about 60 mm on the dot if I go more straight and then uh we look at the width here we are at roughly 42 44 mm and you go to the new Wicked cushion freeze pad we're pushing closer to 47 mm of width and when we look at the height we're about 61 62 mm of height so the pads are a little bit bigger they also are a little bit deeper now I found out after opening this that my batter is getting low so if this starts blinking that's why but it still works accurately the stock pad depth uh from the back Edge to to the front before I start comp compressing the pad a little bit is just about 26 1/2 mm let's compress it slightly so we'll just say 26 mm you can see there's just a little bit of give right there and that's not bad that's actually a good pad depth the wicked cushion freeze pad is giving us a little bit more we're closer to 29 mm of pad depth so the little extra depth if you've ever felt like the stock pad isn't quite large enough for your ear but it's not bad the freeze pad being just slightly B bigger both in depth width and height might be just enough to make you have the Comfort you've been looking for so um let's talk about weight because anytime you get into a freeze pad because they have the gel they are a little bit heavier so the stock pads if I put this on my little scale is 42 G now if I switch to the freeze pad I'm at 86 G 88 G I just gained some weight so you're gaining you're doubling the weight essentially from your stock pad that does feel a little heavier when you're just holding the headset but when you're wearing it because the weight gained is on the pad itself it's not really too noticeable um but that's the way they weigh then we look at the pad compression now I talked about the pad stiffness being a thing earlier the stock pads are very squishy and you can see that as you put some pressure on them they kind of shrink down a little bit this is also why you can see a really nice seal right here and that's what traps out or blocks out the noise you go to the wiked cushion freeze pad I do have to push a little bit further or a little bit harder to compress the pad however the pad's not shrinking much on the inside which is why you also maintain that space around your ear this is still flattening up I'm still getting a decent seal now I actually measured the noise reduction uh characteristic of both pads I have a a headphone rig that measures both I have like artificial ears that measures everything I use um as far as my reviews go and I I lost about 3 DB of noise isolation with the freeze pad it's not a big difference but if you are intimately familiar with the Stealth Pro you know exactly how it sounds because you use it all the time switching to the freeze pad you're you're going to hear just a little bit more background noise without active noise cancellation on and with noise cancellation on you may just hear a little bit more fan noise if your PC fans are whirling away it's not a big difference but it is a few DCB so you can notice it if you've been playing with this for you know hours of time at a time for the past few months since you bought it so I do prefer the freeze pads from a comfort perspective only because I don't game for 15 to 20 minutes at a time if I'm sitting down with these it's because I want to play for a few hours so the biggest Improvement for me is the comfort so let's talk about sound quality all right so when I first reviewed the Stealth Pro I actually measured the um frequency response on my headphone measuring rig and I think since the firm updates came out they changed the sound profile a little bit I kind of noticed that within a month or two after the review so I remeasured it and updated my uh website database now if you're not familiar with this you're new to the channel one huge thank you don't forget to like And subscribe um but I measure and update all of the headsets that I review I actually have about 30 to 40 more headsets I haven't added yet that I still have so this will be expanding and it helps give you an idea on how one headset sounds compared to another so when we look at the stock frequency response that's the Blue Line This is the stock signature sound on the Stealth Pro all three sliders set to zero the blue line is how it measures and they bumped the base in that mid-base area like the 80 HZ 120 htz which is fine a lot of people like that kind of base and because they scooped it down as you approach 300 htz it doesn't sound too muddy either so uh and then you can see the the rest of the curve is actually really nice for the Stealth Pro there's a little bit of a peak around 8,000 Herz and that's where a lot of people are sensitive to that really sharp treble so if you ever do your own custom EQ just drop 8K down by a few DB and it's even easier to listen to when I switch to the freeze pad I mentioned how this impacts sound quality because it's a little bit more open I technically have less of an airtight seal it's not much but it is enough as you see here on the green line to reduce the base a little bit now this is super easy to read with the Turtle Beach app the audio Hub app you can just take 120 HZ and the 64 HZ bands and just boost them a little bit and you're right back to where you were however I actually like the sound profile with the freeze pad more cuz I don't like too strong of Base I want it to be a little bit cleaner the benefit of the freeze pad is the base delivery is actually smoother it's less peaky so if you do listen to these or listen to music with these it sounds more natural with the freeze pad when you look in the mid-range it's a really good match as well you have a bump in the 500 HZ region um just by switching pads but it's only one or two DB most people aren't going to notice it and this is a lot of where your vocals come from especially male vocals so it's not necessarily a bad bump again this is without doing any EQ whatsoever just plug and forget or Swap and forget I guess in this case when you look at the higher frequencies it's similar they have a couple different Peaks and dips but headphone measuring rigs versus your ear even if I had like the $40,000 headphone measuring rig out there the way my system measures travel is not exactly how you're going to perceive it I'm only showing you how this measures on my rig between one pad to the other it's a minimal change personally I feel like what I've always noticed with the freeze pads is they tend to be a little bit stronger between 6 to 8,000 Hertz for me um mostly in this case it's 8,000 HZ for this particular model so by switching it if you don't want to do a custom EQ um which I can show you here in a moment just drop 8 khz down by 3 DB maybe boost 4K by 2 DB and that's a great sound profile now I did do a custom EQ and if you look at the bottom of this page here and I click on you can see where it says GT custom EQ all I have to do is click this plus sign and I'm going to or get rid of the stock profile for now I didn't do a major tune but you can tell that after my custom EQ the base is kind of a little bit emphasized again in that deeper base so we preserve the stock sound I reduced the 500 HZ by only one or two DB and I filled in the 4K region to I it to me it just brings out a little bit more detail of the headset and you can see a few decb were taken off I don't do aggressive eqs because I want to preserve more of the sound that you're used to I just clean it up a little bit and then you can adjust it from there so if you like the idea of what I did for EQ here is my custom preset on the screen scre feel free to pause it right here copy it I do have numbers to the best of my ability to help kind of show you how I dialed it in but overall even without swapping this is one of the few headsets the other one being the Odyssey Maxwell where you can basically just get a freeze pad switch them out and you're good to go now numbers aside and measurements aside my real world experience I kind of lean towards the freeze pad only for the breathability that's typically the most important thing for me is long-term Comfort outside of obviously sound quality and it working the way it's supposed to so when it comes to pads though you don't want to negatively impact your sound or destroy the sound but anything that improves Comfort is great I think some people may like the stock pad more if you have thicker glasses and you're concerned with pressure on your head the stock pads just have slightly less pressure um they also have better noise isolation but again the long-term breathability and more space inside the ear in addition to getting your custom designs to make your headset look a little bit more unique there's a lot of things to like about the freeze pad it didn't negatively impact my ability to play firstperson shooters or anything like that so the FPS stuff is not affected by it and that's partly because they were really reserved frankly with the pad size they could have gone huge some of the other Wicked cushion pads in the past have been a lot thicker than stock which can have a big difference on how you hear audio coming from it so with this pad because it was only a tiny adjustment in size there's no ma Major Impact in performance for gaming so I had no problems just switching and playing and now I can wear it for a longer period of time without getting that nasty uh ear sweat so that about wraps up the video hopefully you found it helpful and you learned what you needed today don't forget to like And subscribe again I'd love to see at the next video and if you do purchase these remember I have discount codes below to take 15% off so thank you as always and I'll see you next time [Music] bye [Music]

Channel: GadgetryTech

Views: 9,526

Keywords: wicked cushion stealth pro, wicked cushions stealth pro, wicked cushions freeze review, wicked cushions stealth pro review, turtle beach stealth pro, stealth pro pad replacement, new pads for stealth pro, headset pad replacement, wicked cushions pads for stealth pro, wicked cushions for stealth pro, wicked cushions for turtle beach, pad replacement for stealth pro, Wicked cushion pads stealth pro, Wicked cushion pads for stealth pro, Freeze pads for stealth pro

Id: atsYhHs8c3A

Length: 16min 5sec (965 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 01 2023