[section_title title=”Performance”]
There are three main areas to address when it comes to a headset, they are Comfort, Audio Quality, and Microphone performance. I’m going to start off with what I consider the most important, and that is comfort.
Comfort
Being of conventional telescopic headband design the Rage V2s offer plenty of adjustment in terms of sizing so they will be suitable for virtually everyone in the sizing department. As I have alluded to earlier however said headband is very economically addorned with what is actually quite a hard material. The problem is the width of the pad is so narrow that I found it would actually dig into my head a bit which after about an hour of wear became uncomfortable enough for me to want to take them off which for a gaming headset is naturally annoying.
I also found that the ear cups weren’t large enough to sit over my ears with enough clearance to allow my glasses to move freely and comfortably, indeed I’d even have to say if you have particularly chunky frames on your glasses you should give the Rage V2s a miss altogether. If you don’t wear glasses however the ear cups should be more liveable but even then the padding is harder than I’d like and there isn’t really much room inside the cups for those with larger ears.
In summary of the comfort side of things, I have to say the headset is one of the least comfortable ones I have ever used and in comparison to competition like the HyperX Clouds and ASUS’ Echelon/Orion the Rage V2s just don’t cut the mustard.
Audio Quality
If the ergonomics were disappointing, one thing we can count on Creative for has to be audio quality; and they have mostly delivered there with the Rage V2s. The 50mm drivers sound a bit dull compared to the competition, but they do pack a nice bassy punch and the clarity is good enough for the price point.
When listening to The Last Dancer by iamamiwhoami, the mixture of sharp vocals, synths and a subdued but deep bassline show that the headset is capable of balancing the entire spectrum into a fairly decent listening experience but compared to equally priced competition they do fall behind.
In CS:GO I found that the drivers produced solid directional sound and generally a nice immersive play session thanks to the decent amount of bass. They also handled the sounds of Risk of Rain well, which can sound crackly and unpleasant on some headsets.
Really, when it comes to audio quality the Rage V2 is about right for a headset of this price; it’s just that it faces equally priced competition in the Echelon Forest and the HyperX Cloud which both eclipse it in all areas.
Microphone
Always a crucial part of a gaming headset I found the mic on the Rage V2s to be well up to the job quality wise, though it was a touch quiet in my testing. As I always say though, for me the measure of a mic being good enough is not receiving copious abuse when logging into mumble and the Rage V2s passed that test so I’ve no major complaints to make here.
The voice changer is worth another mention too as it is good for some cheap laughs.
