Razer Tiamat 7.1 Surround Sound Gaming Headset Unboxing and Full Review vs. Astro A50 headset
Razer Tiamat 7.1 V2 Surround Sound Gaming Headset on Amazon
The Razer Tiamat 7.1 are a very expensive gaming headset. It does have some premium features such as an external sound mixer with a large knob for adjusting the volume. The audio mixer has three buttons on it and they perform the following functions: mute/unmute sound, switch between pc speakers and headphones, and a button to switch between stereo and 7.1 surround sound. The last smaller knob on the audio mixer is a selector for choosing between adjustments for main volume, front, center, side, mic volume, sub, and rear. The Razer Tiamat 7.1 is completely wired and requires you to have 7.1 audio connectors on your computer as opposed to the Astro A50’s which are wireless and instead relies on simulated 7.1 software based surround sound. The earcups were a decent size, but I found them to be a little bit too small that they didn’t completely go over my ear so you do feel some discomfort on the ears after using these past an hour, the Astro A50’s on the other hand completely covered my ears. The headband was very good had plenty of padding and was very comfortable on my head. The aesthetic design of the headphones look great in all black with a razer green logo illuminating the side of the headphones. Unfortunately there was no lighting on the sound mixer so it was hard to adjust settings while in the dark. The microphone on these worked well, but I felt like the mic was going to break whenever I would pull out the mic as it made a weird cracking sound. Using the headphones in stereo mode worked very well, however problems started once I started using surround sound 7.1. These headphones will require hours upon hours of trying to configure these headphones to sound right when using 7.1 surround sound. Even after purchasing the recommended sound card ASUS Xonar DX it did improve things slightly as I was able to make more adjustments, but it was a never ending loop of adjustments each time trying to make everything sound good. These headphones sound great for gaming, but when you try to use them for watching movies or listening to music they sound horrible. You are pretty much limited to using them for gaming. In the end I just ended up returning the Razer Tiamat 7.1 headset as they were just to tedious to configure to sound right, I ended up replacing them with the Astro A50 Wireless Headphones which required almost zero configuration for them to sound great.
Update 10/8/2017: Razer release the Razer Tiamat 7.1 V2, which is a second version of these, but the reviews are mixed.
