Does it appear to you that the hardware market is increasingly oriented towards the gaming population? The cycle for presenting new gaming products seems to have been reduced to a couple of months for some companies, and that’s the case this time around as well. Cooler Master has done their best to expand their offer of gaming products by inserting the Sirus 5.1 gaming headset into the Storm family. Aware that Cooler Master has rarely been the one to disappoint, especially with the Storm series, we’ve been more than eager to get down to testing the headset.
The headphones themselves are huge in every sense of the word. Now, normally, this would discourage us, as size usually means mass, and mass means discomfort and ear strain during longer gaming sessions. However, this model just sticks to the head perfectly, and we’ve been unable to really strain ourselves after hours of gaming, listening to music and watching films. To make things better, two sets of clips come with the headset, one made of faux-leather, and another with simple sponge-like material. Although the spongy clips may seem more pleasant in these summer days, leather has turned out to be better for noise isolation and overall sound quality.
Of course, gamer headphones wouldn’t be worth very much without a microphone. The microphone on this headset is a unidirectional one, which means that you can use it in any position, as its name says. The headset itself has a dark grey colour, with a few patches of black here and there, and its quality is simply phenomenal. This model doesn’t have any hinges, which makes it impossible for the headset to be folded in any way, and therefore isn’t too portable, so it might not be your weapon of choice if you’re a frequent visitor of LAN parties. However, while other allegedly 5.1 systems don’t really physically possess six drivers, Cooler Master’s latest does - the specification is fulfilled to the last letter, and each headphone has three 30 mm drivers and one 40 mm woofer, which gives us a total of eight speakers.
Another feature that clearly distinguishes this model from all others is the presence of a “tactical mixing console”, as Cooler Master calls it. This is essentially a real (and heavy!) console that you’d ideally place on the desk. It contains a sound card of its own and attaches to the PC via two USB ports. It has a large and marvellously precise potentiometer, as well as a few buttons for regulating each driver on its own, as well as entire sets or channels. There’s also the mute button for quickly muting the sound. To make things more interesting, this console is connected to the headset via a special jack which also supports the standard cable with four 3.5 mm connectors (three for sound and one for the microphone), and a USB port for supplying the headset with power. Once everything’s connected and ready to run, Cooler Master’s logo on each side will light up in all its red splendour, typical for high-end gaming peripherals.
