-Hey what's going on everyone, I'm Jeff Bakalar.
Today, we have a very special first look.
It's the Turtle Beach PX5.
Now, the PX5's are by far Turtle Beach is most ambitious effort in the world of surround wireless gaming headsets.
First thing they did with this is add a brand new functionality.
They put in a Bluetooth radio into the headset.
So, if you're playing a game
using the chat microphone, you can actually take a phone call from your smart phone during game play, which is something no other headset on the market does.
Also, you can bind it to a music player that supports Bluetooth compatibility.
Now, in terms of actual sound, the PX5's are up there with some of the best headsets we've ever reviewed including the Astro A40s.
They give a lot of base, give a lot of treble, lot of rich and full sounds.
Now, if you don't like any of the presets that are bundled in with the PX5 and there are 18 of them, that right 18 presets, you can download some software from Turtle Beache's website and customize any of the 18 presets you want.
Only caveat here, the software will not work on a Mac computer.
On the side of the ear cups here is a little USB port that lets you hook up your headset to the computer and transfer over new settings, really cool stuff.
Speaking about their built in presets, there's 18, 9 for Xbox 360, and 9 for Playstation 3 and the range from different sort of stereo preferences.
The one that I really like using was something where it heightened the footsteps if you play a lot online multiplayer like I play [unk] black apps.
You can put the setting in and you can actually hearing footsteps better than you normally could without a turned on.
Sort of like cheating almost, but it's a really cool feature nonetheless.
There's no rechargeable battery solution, you have to use AA batteries, but I've been using this for about 3 weeks and I have not had to change the batteries at all.
Around the back is all the connectivity settings that you will have to deal with.
Ideally, you're gonna be wanting to use an optical input, so there is an in and out.
So, basically, you don't have to continually unplug an optical digital audio cable from your receiver.
You can have one going in here, one coming out.
It does require power
But you can use a USB port to power the headset receiver base.
Also, on the back, we have standard analog audio inputs, and you can control that level input right below that as well.
Now, a word on how well the transmitting base performs.
It is a little sort strange looking.
It does double as the holder for the headset.
You're gonna need to find an area you can put this in where line of sight is easy to come, but don't think
you can put this behind your television and use it because when I tried to do that, we got some static in our headset.
Also, you're going to want to keep this as far away as possible for many sort of wireless router because that 2.4 GHz band gets crowded real quick and that's what this operates on.
That's what your wireless rather operates on.
Another word on bypassing the audio.
The in and out is a little finicky.
We don't really recommend going in and out of the actual base.
Other than that, this is by far one of the best performing headsets we've ever tested.
It's definitely right there with some of the high end super expensive stuff like I talked about earlier, the Astro A40s.
Definitely, we're checking out, 250 dollar price tag, it's pretty high, but this will not just work with consoles, it will work with any sort of source material that gives you a surround sound feed, definitely recommended.
It's got also a removable boom mic, which is also really cool.
You can take this off when you're not using it.
That's gonna do it for me.
This has been the Turtle Beach PX5.
I'm Jeff Bakalar for cnet.com thanks for watching.
