Astro A40 with wireless Mixamp

So, yesterday FedEx dropped off my new surround sound headset, the Astro A40s. After much anticipation, I finally got these badboys on my ears and hooked up. First things first, the package as a whole comes as two pieces. 

The wireless MixAmp. 

This is the brains of the operation, where everything plugs into. It has two components, the Tx Unit, where you have your optical input, and optical output (incase you want to pass audio through) and the Rx Unit, which is where the actual headphones plug into. So the Tx Unit, requires a power supply, and sits near your console/tv. The Rx Unit wirelessly receives the audio from the Tx and can sit in your lap, or clip to a belt.

The A40 Headset

These are the headset unit itself, which despite the look, are actually quite light (to me). There is also a place on each side of the headset to plug in a mic to, which beats a lot of the other headsets on the market, which mainly just have the mic hardwired on.

Initial reactions: Wow. Mind you I haven’t put a lot of time on these, only having them for a day, but they are fantastic. I am impressed at the sound you get out of these thing. I mean I was playing a bit of Dead Space 2 last night, and as I’m walking down a hallway, I heard something creeping up on me from the back, I didn’t see it on the screen mind you, I actually heard the bastard coming from the rear, and had time to turn around and light em up. That alone, mind you put the smile on my face, which instantly made me forget about the price tag on these thing. 

I’m loving the Voice/Game volume adjuster on these things. As I have a set of Logitech G36s for the PC, which are another 7.1 surround headsets, but EVERYtime the action gets intense (guns blaring, zombies munching) the Voice volume just goes away. I don’t know how many times I’ve missed my teammates in L4D2 cry for help, when we were in the middle of some big gunfights. But the Astros make that a thing of the past, I can definitively set the balance as i see fit.

Now, these are just my impressions, and I’ll prolly put some more detail as I play more with em. But I ran through the Bulletstorm, Killzone3 demos. Dead Space 2, Blur 2, and COD: Black Ops. And they just sound awesome, crystal clear, good bass, great directional sound. Just an awesome headset, everything I wanted in a headset. And they damn well better be for the price.

The one thing I do have to say as a downside, is that the wireless MixAmp only accepts optical in, whereas the wired one, accepts RCA jacks i believe, so you’d be able to plug your Wii. In my case however my television (luckily) has an optical output, so anything plugged into it, I can have feed into my headset. Wii, Home Theater, PS3, Xbox, Cablebox, etc. Its friggin great. No more waking up the kid & wife.  


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