Audio Quality and Comfort
To put the Hephaestus v2’s through their paces I spent a few weeks using the headset as my main headset on my main PC. This gave me a chance to try them out in game as well as when watching movies and listening to music. I focused on both their comfort as well as the audio performance.
Starting with comfort I want to say again that the Hephaestus v2’s are a little bigger than normal. Even with my big head I only had to adjust them out about half way. I was a little concerned with this because some people with a smaller head might have trouble with them not fitting. To test this, I had my wife try them on. They did go small enough to fit her head but she wasn’t especially happy with how they fit her. For me, it was 50/50. I love the large earcups, they don’t touch my ears and typically this is where I get the most discomfort. I wasn’t as big of a fan of the padding in the headband, though, in fact, I think they could use softer padding in the headband and in the earcups to give the Hephaestus v2’s a plusher feeling when you wear them. When using the Hephaestus v2’s in an extended period of time I had a little discomfort on the headband but at least with the big earcups, I was good there.
As for the audio performance, I went in a little hesitant. I’m not a big fan of 7.1 headphones. In this case, officially the Hephaestus v2’s are actually just a normal headset but the built in sound card simulates 7.1. The directionality was good but I think I would be happier with the 2.1 version of the Hephaestus v2. Audio performance was a little hit and miss as well. The Hephaestus v2’s were missing a little something in the highs especially. I spent a lot of time toying with the vibration feature. You can turn it on and off by pushing the Gamdias logo on the controller. Without the vibration turned on there isn’t enough bass, turning it on did help with this most of the time, though. There are some songs that don’t get into the range of the vibration for their bass. But on the songs that did benefit the bass would sometimes rattle my teeth. Overall the feature seemed to help cover up a lack of range on the main speakers. I will say though that I really wish the controller had a way to indicate when the microphone is muted and when the vibration was turned on. I had to mess with that more than I would like to make sure it was working. Speaking of the controller I also noticed that the buttons in it rattled when you move it around. Beyond that I did like that they included an option to be able to turn off the lighting on the sides of the headset, not everyone wants to be glowing when they listen to music or game.
