Friends have told me that the quality of my voice has been pretty poor (fading, cutting off) when playing multiplayer and since I already went through puberty (30 years ago) I'm going to blame my mic. I may have accidentally run over the cord of my headset a few too many times. I am now in the market for a replacement. For reference, my current headset is a Sennheiser PC-151 which has overall served me decently. I don't have a fixed budget, though I'm not looking to spend hundreds of dollars on a de-luxe model that would be overkill. I'm also unsure of whether to go USB or not, so thoughts are welcome on that, too. These would be used for multiplayer games, listening to music and hearing that chime Windows makes when I click the wrong thing. Any and all recommendations are appreciated!
Does your computer already have a soundcard/onboard sound? If the answer is yes, then you can safely skip the USB headsets. I've been quite happy with my Razer Carcharias. It's an open-ear design which is nice as I find my ears get really hot with the closed cups. Additionally, they're nice and light, which means I can wear them for quite a while. Sound quality is fairly decent, not as good as my 5.1 speaker set-up I've got plugged into my PC, but for late night quiet gaming or just relaxing to some music they get the job done quite well. Edit to add: They also use a foam cushion on the ear-cup, which I vastly prefer to the fake-leather shit so many headsets use. The only downside to them is I'm starting to not really like Razer that much as their keyboard/mouse software is a goddamned fucking travesty which puts their future products in the 'do not buy' category for me.
Ned, you seemed to come through fine when you were on push-to-talk, so it seemed like more of a problem with LOTRO's talk detection than the headset itself. If you're having trouble in other games too, then that does sound a bit more serious though.
Get another pair of pc151's, that's what I did when mine broke a year or do back (after several years of heavy use).
Thanks for the link, SqueakyFoo. And Talisker, I have considered just getting another pair of the Sennheisers. A local store even has them on sale until the 22nd. Mr. Pants and I decided to rack up debt in a penultimate round of City of Heroes and I could see and he confirmed that my voice was regularly cutting off and fading. We were using Ventrilo but I think the headset is really just at the end of its life. It had fallen off the desk a few more times recently, too.
