To put the Roccat Vire through its paces I’ve devised a set of tests so that we can determine whether this headset is up to the challenge of being a quality gaming peripheral.

So to test, I will be using the Roccat Vire on the PC with an assortment of music and games. I will also be testing the Vire on my Blackberry Curve 8900 with some music and video.

Games
Two games were selected for this test. I chose World of Warcraft and Crysis. Two of the most popular gaming titles on the PC.

At various stages during these gaming sessions the clarity experienced was very good. Each of the sounds was easily picked up and this gave both titles especially Crysis a lot of depth - enhancing the gameplay. Gun fire, explosions, ambience and dialogue had their own pitch and each easily picked up. No fuzzing at all, the playback from the
earphones is impressive and does add some great realism to your games.

As for the microphone. This I tested through teamspeak with a friend. We jumped in game, whilst having a game of Call of Duty 5 – World at War. My friend commented on the playback and said “your voice was clear, precise and I had no problem picking you up at all”. So good news on that front also. The mic might not be floating near my mouth but it still picks up my voice with ease.

Music
With the music test I loaded some different songs to get a feel for the various audio qualities. These are the tracks I loaded: Dizzee Rascal – Holiday, Linkin Park – What I’ve done, Cascada – Everytime we touch. Again clarity here is great. Treble and sound quality is also very good but what I feel lacks is the bass. It needs altering. It doesn’t feel deep enough instead the tracks, especially Linkin Park and Cascada’s tracks sounded a little bit tinny and the power taken away slightly. The bass tones are something that I feel Roccat should improve on this headset.

Blackberry
The Blackberry test was similar to the music test although I had the phone in my pocket. I fed the cables up my shirt. Without the adaptor the earphones did actually fit fine, so there was no need to extend the cable. Again similar to the music test, the music was great quality – good treble and clarity. In fact there wasn’t much difference with the sound quality between PC and Blackberry. But similarly it did lack some bass definition. Overall, impressive and very portable.