I bought 2 pair of new headphones from Amazon recently. They are Turtle Beach’s model Ear Force X2 headsets.
The primary purpose of these headsets is to connect them to an XBox 360 controller as the microphone source. What happens is the headset’s base station, while connected to the Xbox, transmits the game audio to the stereo headset, and the headset’s microphone connects to the controller to send Live chat sound back to the game. It’s a pretty nifty idea, but not why I bought them.
My purpose for buying the headset was that the 2.5mm plug on them would fit nicely into the jack on my office’s cordless phone. My expectation was that I could hook the headset to the PC to listen to music, and then also take calls using the headset by connecting the dongle wire to my phone. Non-monaural audio playback for phone conversations would alleviate many of the problems I have in my office regarding ambient noise. But it seems that my plans have been squashed by poor (or cheap) forethought.
Generally the problem is that the headphones don’t work as I expected them to. A regular XBox 360 headset gets its earpiece audio and microphone feed directly from the controller. That is, the controller supplies the XBox Live in-game chat audio to the headset, and the microphone input. Both of these happen through the single wire that connects to the headset.
With the Ear Force X2 headset, you are required to reconfigure the XBox so that it combines the chat audio with the regular game audio. This results in the XBox system sending all of the audio to the headset via the infrared base station. None of the chat audio is relayed from the controller to the headset via the connecting wire. The connecting wire is only used to send the microphone input into the controller and back to the game.
This is lame.
At this point, I’m wondering how much surgery it might require to open up the headphones and connect the incoming audio on the port (I believe that the contact is correct) to combine it with the audio from the base station. Do you think it’s possible? What concerns should I have? Will the headphone speakers blow up? Is this something other people will be interested in?
This is just another in a long series of strange shortcomings in consumer devices. Why didn’t Turtle Beach take it the next step and combine the audio from the controller into the headset audio themselves? Obviously, it must be related to the bottom-line: Cost. But considering what one normally pays for these headphones (they ain’t cheap), you’d think that an extra couple of wires and a resistor or two would still pay out for them.
Maybe I should just look for the Ear Force X3 and pay 3 times as much. But then I’m sure it’ll be completely lacking some other dumb thing, like a volume knob.
