Related Articles

The gaming market is rapidly expanding these days, not only just in the software realm but in the hardware arena as well. Given the onslaught of professional gamers and gaming tournaments, everyone wants to have the highest end hardware they can get. In this case it's a situation of an accurate high performance headphone and microphone set. As most squad based FPS players know, a solid mic and headset combination is a crucial thing, anyone can roll with a $5 mic and some cheap headphones, but when you step it up and show your A game, do you really want to get knifed because you couldn't figure out where the steps were coming from? I'm pretty sure that any gamer that has gotten into a situation like that can easily relate various system problems as to why they got knifed, and sometimes those citings are actually true.

The AK-R8 brings gamers a new level of performance, 5.1 output using 8 speakers for intense surround sound or 7.1 audio using 8 speakers for emulated DDEX surround, personally for surround I like the 5.1, it's focused on the high notes and giving some effects to the show. The 7.1 setting is a bit out there for me and I can't say I'm totally sold on it, honestly it's probably better suited for the expansion abilities of the SRM instead of the headphones themselves. Outside of the surround realm you can roll the features all the way back to 2.0 Headphone behavior, in which case, be ready for the bass as the driver packs quite a punch compared to surround mode.

Some basic features of the AK-R8 include the use of a dual center, front, surround and center speaker as well as a dedicated low frequency module for heavy bass output. Honestly, the speakers are there to do the job, even while working in the 30 hour break-in period, the headphones were on target. At this point I think they deliver a richer tone especially in 2.0 mode where the headphones just go for raw power.

Testing was based on the following:

Music:

Oceans 13 OST | Oreskaband

Movies:

Crank | 300

Games:

Counter-Strike: Source | Battlefield 2

Hardware:

Turtle Beach AudioAdvantage SRM

Turtle Beach AK-R8

AMD X2 4200+

ATI X1800XT 512

Creative X-Fi XtremeMusic

Windows XP SP2