After a hard day of work most people seek different ways to relax during the evening (at least that’s the case for me), a great way to relieve some stress is to spend a few hours blasting away in virtual 3D world. But when you are living in a heavy populated area, playing deep into the night with your speakers booming at full volume might get you intro trouble. Which brings us to headphones, those geeky looking things we put over our ears to enjoy music has been a favorite for the die-hard gamers out there who want to enjoy the thrills of frills of hearing rockets swoosh by their ears.

If you visit LAN parties often you want to make sure you have a good headset as this is mostly the only means of hearing the beeps and bleeps of your system. For a headphone to be qualified as good it has to measure up in two different areas: sound quality and comfort.

Today we are taking a look at the Sharkoon Gamer headset which combines headphones and a mic into one product. Before we start off it’s important to note that the GHS1 is priced at €25 which puts it right in the budget section of the market.



This product is marketed at the Gamers out there and the package is flashy and attractive, the headphones sport a very lengthy cable ending with 2 audio connector, one for the mic and one for the headphones as you might have figured out.







Me and TerAngreal each tested the headphones during a period of 7 days, playing games, watching movies and listening music, I compared the GHS1 to a Sony MDR-CD570 (€100) and TerAngreal to the Sennheiser HD-590 (€230). With such expensive competition it is expected that the Sharkoon will drag behind, the question is: by how much? Let’s test them and find out.

The comments in Italic are made by TerAngreal where applicable.

Comfort

First thing you are bound to notice are the cups which are too small to fit around your ears, unless you are a twelve-year old, so you feel a constant pressure. Luckily Sharkoon got the earphones padded and they are comfortable for limited periods of time (2 hours being the limit in my case). It sits sturdy on your head and “regulated” head-banging did not make them fall down, which is a good thing of course.

The top bow is padded also and overall it has a soft feel, but the drawback of the “too-small-to-fit-around-my-ears” cups is rather worrying if you plan to spend hours on end isolated with these things on your head.

I can't keep this headset on my head for more then 10 minutes, as it puts a constant strain on the ears. Circum aural headsets can be very comfy, supra aural is a good way to make a product like this cheaper and more compact - but this combination here fails to offer an advantage unfortunately.

Gaming

After installing the UT2004 demo I loaded up Microsoft’s voice recognition program to calibrate the sound profile, after a few minutes of reading nonsense text out loud at 2am in the morning it was time to fire-up the game and see if the bots would listen to my yells and screams.

Before long I was ordering a bunch of computer controlled players to jump up and down and run in circles around me, the microphone picked up my voice clearly enough for the PC to make out was I was mumbling into it. So far so good, since in-game voice is highly compressed you won’t find much difference in sound quality between this mic or the one used in a local radio station.

The sound it produces in-game is acceptable but I noticed a distinct lack of bass. Compared to the Sony headphones the Sharkoon does not deliver a very convincing “rocket launcher swooping by your head”-kind of sound.

I chose one of my favorite games to test the GHS1: Mafia. This masterpiece really has a magnificent feel, thanks to the setting; the story and what certainly added up to the magic was the in-game sound. Having experienced this splendor wearing the Sennheiser set, playing Mafia with the Sharkoon does not have the same appeal to me, some of the magic is lost.


Music

I listened to wide variety of rock, classical sounds, some dance and hip hop. The lack of bass is slightly recovered by the wider variety of sound levels, but the music does not seem as full as when heard through the Sony headphones.

After that I hooked it up to my portable MP3 player, a Creative MUVO Slim, the sound was clear and easily matched that of the included Creative earplugs.

I don’t find this headset suited to listen to music; it completely lacks bass, and features an overdose of distorted mid-tones. I know I'm probably reacting a bit more strongly than an average gamer, but sound/music is very important to me. The most expensive part of my first setup was my soundcard, and last year I bought my third Sennheiser -- the HD-590 model, which cost me about €230 at that time. I don't want to brag here, I just want you to understand my point. If you want a headphone which is also suited for music, then add €10-15 to the GHS1’s price, and buy yourself a basic Sennheiser model.


Conclusion

As a headphone the Sharkoon GHS1 has a hard time to keep up with the known brands, luckily, as a headset it has enough features to please the occasional gamer who spends a couple of hours on his PC.

The sound quality is average and for its price it offers a product of good value. Its finishing on the exterior is very slick just wish this could have been copied to the internals also!

We would like to thank Thorsten at Sharkoon for providing us with the GHS1.

Question/Comments: forum thread