When it comes to gaming, there are few things more important that the devices you use to actually make contact with the game. Devices like video displays, mice, mouse pads, and headphones are critical to maintain your play at its utmost potential. A good pair of headphones really goes a long way towards improving your game. They can help you position footsteps, hear even the most minor changes in sound, and receive information from your teammates with little distortion. Even on the non-gaming aspect of our computer lives, a good set of headphones goes a very long way. It makes listening to music more enjoyable, or watching a movie, for example. We’ve recently acquired a two pairs of headphones from Sennheiser for us to review, and these aren’t your typical PC-series headsets. These are the HD435 and HD555 headphones. They come with a hefty price tag, but are they worth it? Read on and find out.

Testing headphones is a tricky business. There is really no exact way to calculate how “good” they sound, so it's mostly subjective. We’ve tried to take as much guesswork out of the process as possible by assembling a list of criteria that we will specifically test these headphones with. Here’s what we came up with:

• Sound quality while playing games. Obviously, this is the most critical aspect of any gamer considering a new headset. We’ve tried to go into as much detail on this area as possible in order to bring you a good picture of it. Our gaming test involves ZeGermans going into a DoD 24/7 avalanche pub and playing until he gets banned. This process usually takes about 10 minutes.
• Sound quality while playing music. This ranks #2 among most gamers with regards to headphones. If the headphones can’t let you rock out to your favorite mp3’s while you’re pubbing, what’s the point? We’ve opted for a 320Kbps recording of Beethoven’s 9th symphony, listening to the 8-minute instrumental part of the Ode to Joy melody. The multitude of frequencies, countermelodies, and volumes make this stretch of music ideal.
• Sound quality while playing movies. There are quite a few gamers out there, myself included, that also store quite a few videos on their computer. Taking advantage of the massive amounts of storage space around today as well as the huge monitors most of us use, watching a movie the computer is more and more becoming an everyday thing. Therefore it warrants us taking a close look at the sound quality in this category. The sequences used to test this were from several fight scenes in the only movie we had on hand, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.
• Comfort. Who cares how good the headset sounds if you can’t wear it on your head? Making a headset comfortable is important to any of us that sit in front of our computers for hours at a time. We had no exact way of testing this, so it’s purely dependant on ZeGermans' fat ears.
• Other bells and whistles. While this isn’t critical, it’s always nice when the manufacturer throws in some goodies to show their appreciation for you in purchasing their product.