PC150

First Impressions
The packaging of the PC150s is a lot more reminiscent of your typical headset packaging than either the 5Hs or the Siberias. In addition, the contents are much more typical of any headset you'll get: Just the headset and a 6 foot cord attached to it. No other frills. Even though they're only half the price of the Siberias or 5Hs, I was kind of expecting something more.

Design
The PC150s are sort of a half-closed rear headset, if that makes any sense. Your ears don't fit inside the phones, but instead, the padding around the phones rests on the outside of your ear. This is not nearly as comfortable as the closed-ear 5H or Siberia, and leads to your ears hurting after about an hour of use. The microphone is held on by a fixed rubber stock that allows for a minimal amount of adjustment. When not in use, it can be swung up so that it points straight in to the air. This is fine for sitting in front of a computer, but if you're on the run listening to a CD player, you'll look rather foolish.

The mic and headphone cords both come out of the headset and hit an attached sound controller, which allows for volume adjustment and mic muting. The cords then plug into your sound device on your computer. From the headset all the way to the tip of the headphone jacks, this product is all one piece.

Sound
The sound produced by the PC150s is more than adequate. It blows away budget Wal-Mart headsets in sound quality, especially in the lower ranges. When I first got my pair, there were times when I thought I had my stereo turned on (which was connected to my computer) only to realize that the sound I was hearing was coming solely from my headphones. It's a great place to start if you're looking to delve into the realm of gaming headgear, but it is also certainly far from the best on the market. The same can be said about the PC150s music playback quality. Better than most, but far from the best. Once again, it provides better music with less background noise than most devices found on the market, but compared to even the 5H, which as mentioned before, has less than stellar musical playback, it lags behind. Next to the Siberia... it doesn't even come remotely close.

The USB Sound Cards

Both the siberias and the 5Hs have the option of coming with a USB sound card. This wouldn't be a full review if we didn't spend some time on these devices. The devices use an extremely similar software control panel that is easy to use and a cinch to install. Two methods were used to test out these sound devices. The first is a purely quantitative test run with a 3rd party program. The other is a completely qualitative view of the positional audio these devices provide. In order to get a good grasp of the quantitative quality of these devices, we used a program called Right Mark Audio Analyzer. With this program, you physically connect the headphone output jack straight into the microphone jack, and then it runs a test signal over this loop. It then provides an output based on how much the signal got distorted in the process. Unfortunately, this makes it impossible to determine how much of the distortion is caused by the microphone side of the hardware or the audio transmitting side, but it still remains one of the best tests to perform on audio equipment. Both USB cards are tested against the Audigy2 from Creative and were tested at 24-bit, 96 KHz quality setting.