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Ever heard of Edifier as an audio brand? Nah, us neither, but if their GX Gaming Headset is anything to go by, we’re likely to be hearing much more from these guys going forward.
We’ve used a lot of gaming headsets over the years, from official Microsoft offerings, through the big third party names of Turtle Beach, Razer and SteelSeries and down into the cheaper, no-namers like EKSA – although we’re being a little unfair on them because their E900 headset is really rather good.
In all that time, we’d never been made aware of Edifier. Yet on closer inspection they seem to be one of those mid-market brands who ply their trade on Amazon, racking up some great user reviews in the process.
The GX is one of those headsets. Multiplatform, costing just £100 or so, and running wired audio capabilities, you’d possibly not expect too much from what is in the box.
Open that box though and you’ll immediately be made to feel wrong.
Upon all of the headsets that we’ve unboxed, we didn’t expect the Edifier GX Gaming Headset to be able to provide such a good first impression. But honestly, this thing looks the bomb, belying that sub-ton price tag with aplomb. It looks utterly delicious in its rich red, black and gold trimmed livery, weighted extremely well in the hand.
Class oozes from every visual pore, with a super solid sliding headband padded out to exactly what is required. That padding extends down to the flexing oval earcups, as they fully encase your ears, ready to pound gaming audio your way. And unless you’ve got that audio pumped right up to eleven, rarely will too much break out into the surrounding areas. The GX doesn’t bring full-on immersion, and there’s definitely some audio leak at times, but in all it’s really quite smart, quite sleek, with some real presence felt from the red and gold stylings.
That sleekness is helped by a mere smattering of buttons, all of which fit in well with the design; each of them pretty understated and fairly well hidden away.
There are just two on the externals of each cup in fact. The left plays home to the volume dial and a mic switch, whilst a game mode button and the opportunity to switch on an RGB lighting system built into the external cups, sits on the right. Those lights are quite nice, surrounding the Hecate logo which the Edifier GX runs with green, purple, blue or red vibes, pulsing, cycling or sitting static depending on your mood. It’s nothing utterly major, and we’d not have missed the lighting show if it wasn’t there, but for those in need of something to brighten up a day, it does the business.
The game/music mode switch is an alright addition too, cycling through a few basic equaliser settings. Again, nothing major, but it’s there if you need it.
Comfort is very much on point; a real high for the GX. That leatherette padding around the cups and headband mean that it’s easy enough to wear the Edifier GX Gaming Headset for hours-long sessions, immersing you into the gaming worlds that you like to call home. It’s one of the more comfortable headsets we’ve used in recent times, and so if you’re in the market for something that needs to be placed on your head long term, this could well be of use.
But what about the actual audio that comes in? Well, there are some 50mm drivers built in here and, again, they do what is required of them. We’d not say that the Edifier GX is capable of getting anywhere near what we have found from the big third party manufacturers, but it’s easily acceptable enough for any gaming session, or of use when you’re looking to hide away from the world, kicking back with some tunes. The GX audio that comes your way will feel fairly heavy, hefty in bass when it needs to be, and whilst the busiest of audio tracks sounds a little messy, again, it’s hard to complain too much about what is provided.
Unfortunately we cannot say the same for the audio out; that which is meant to be handled by the integrated, retractable mic. Hidden away inside the left earcup, this is a very flexible microphone that is easy to draw on when you need to deal in communications. At least it should be and in use we’ve had party members complaining about audio echo; duplication of anything and everything that is said. At other times, the mic has not worked at all. It means that except for the shorter, quicker sessions that we’ve taken in, we’ve ditched the Edifier GX for party chat, preferring an old favourite in the EPOS H6PRO. Perhaps the issues are down to the teeny tiny little sticker that sits on the side of the GX box – ‘Mic not available by 3.5mm connection’. That’s not strictly true as it does ‘work’, but is finicky at best.
Further downers come in the fact that the Edifier GX Gaming Headset is a wired headset, one that needs to be cabled into the device of your choice for any action to be hammered home. Connectivity is made via one of two options, both of which are hidden away at the bottom of the left cup – a USB-C port or 3.5mm jack. These can be used with any one of three included cables, with USB-A to USB-C, USB-C to USB-C or 3.5mm to 3.5mm jacks included. The latter of these has an in-line mute button for when you can’t be bothered to reach up to the headset itself; something else that makes the addition of that ‘mic sticker’ somewhat strange. Does the mic work? Doesn’t the mic work? Who knows. Edifier seemingly don’t.
In terms of those cables and as we’re now in negative territory, it seems as good a time as any to warn of anyone wanting to use this as a full-on gaming headset – at least on console. As something connected to a laptop or mobile phone, we’ve absolutely no complaints, but ditch the USB-C cables for the included 3.5mm jack – something that we’d want to connect to our Xbox controller – and you will lose all headset lighting and functions. We can’t even use the volume control on the GX to adjust our game audio. That is a killer.
It all comes together to mean that whilst the Edifier GX Gaming Headset is a pretty damn good looking headset that is capable of near-excelling in some situations, for others, it totally fails. This is a brilliant looking, extremely comfortable multiplatform headset that works absolutely fine with PC or mobile devices. But hook it up to an Xbox console of your choice, and you’ll find only the very bare minimum works. And even then, that is a struggle.
Huge thanks go out to Edifier for providing us with the GX Gaming Headset for review. You can grab one for yourself from Amazon
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