I went for a full-on audiophile quality set last year, buying the
Audeze Mobius, but was massively disappointed with my purchase.
In trying to squeeze as many features as possible in to the headset, they ended up producing a heavy and user-unfriendly headphone.
Admittedly, the sound was pretty good, but in hindsight, even that may have been partially confirmation bias.
So I ended up going back to my trusty old Sennheiser PC 363D, and it made me completely appreciate it anew. It's light, the sound quality is excellent, and it's no-nonsense. I don't have to do any set-up before playing a game or anything. Yeah, you have to install a driver for the USB soundcard it comes with, but that's once-and-done.
With the Mobius, because all the processing hardware was on-board, I had to remember to reset my recording device in Windows every time I powered it on.
If I buy another headset any time soon, I'll probably look at getting the Sennheiser GSX-1000 gaming headphone amplifier, an audiophile-quality normal headphone and an in-line boom mic like
this V-MODA one.
Speaking of V-MODA, my commute headphone is the
V-MODA Crossfade M100.
I used to use a Sennheiser HD25 II (the choice of DJs and post production audio suite operators worldwide), but there's a manufacturing flaw with them where you end up having to replace the main cable frequently.
The V-MODA set is excellent and incredibly well-built, folding away in to a neat little hard clamshell case for transport. The main cable is fully detachable from the headphone itself, and there's a good amount of metal used in the construction, meaning it feels noticeably sturdier than a lot of headphones out there at the same price-point.
I also bought the Astro A40 back in the day as well, but that's nowhere near as good as Sennheiser sets in my experience. Maybe the newer kit's good.
So my takeaway would be, for a gaming headset, you can't beat Sennheiser's stuff, and if you then want to take things a bit more seriously, look at the in-line boom mic, headphone amp and a quality stereo headphone.
I would say if you want to just buy a gaming headset, look to spend around £200 for a really good one.
My PC 363D went end-of-production years ago now, but I think you can still find sets on Amazon and ebay. However, you're probably better off going for
something newer in their line.
And stay the fuck away from the Mobius. At the same time however, the
Audeze LCD-GX is based on their universally well-received LCD reference series featuring planar drivers, and so is probably one of the best listening experiences you can get. But it's
stupidly expensive at $899.
The Mobius has planar drivers too, albeit smaller than those found in the LCD series, and while the experience of using the headset is lousy, I can vouch for the quality of the sound. One thing that certainly isn't confirmation bias is how the audio stays crystal clear at high volumes, not distorting at all. So much so, there's hearing health warnings that come with Audeze gear. Because the audio doesn't distort, it's harder for the user to recognise when the volume is dangerously high.
Edit: Oh yeah, and the major problem I had with the Mobius was that periodically, the onboard surround processing would fuck up, resulting in nasty phasing on the rear channels in 7.1 mode that wouldn't go away even through restoring factory defaults.
From my experience I would say that while Audeze are great at making actual headphones, they're shit at the processing electronics.
Oh, and after a couple of months, the USB-C port used to connect it to the PC developed a dry joint, resulting in the audio cutting out mid-game. Really fucking stupid decision to have all that hardware on-board instead of external to the headphone. They should have stuck with a normal 3.5mm jack setup going to a USB soundcard.
They used USB-C because it needed that bandwidth for the 7.1 audio. But as 7.1 wasn't available in Bluetooth or 3.5mm connected mode, it was really fucking pointless having that processing done on the headphone.
