- You've probably heard us say on this channel
that instead of buying a gaming headset,
you should just buy a good music headphone
and add a microphone.
But what if somebody did that for you?
Well, that's what Audio-Technica did
with their new M50xSTS USB and non-USB headphones.
You just took a good music headphone
and you slap a mic on it.
Boom, it's done, it's good.
It's great, it's gonna be great. Or is it?
That's what we're about to find out.
Both of these headphones are based
on the Audio-Technica M50x's
which is a very well-respected and very popular headphone.
- [David] I'm wearing 'em right now.
- See, David's using them.
We use them on "The WAN Show," they're good headphones.
It seems like as long as they put a good microphone on here,
it's a swing and a hit.
As I said, there's two different models.
We have a USB version and a non-USB version
which allows you to have a 3.5 millimeter plug,
a quarter inch plug, or an XLR plug.
So you can basically plug this into whatever audio interface
you already have set up.
This is gonna be a great option for streamers
and you can hit the ground running.
45 millimeter drivers, microphone mute, yes!
Condenser microphone, a USB output,
and a collapsible portable design.
Inside the box we have a pair of spare ear pads,
I like to see it.
And inside, that's about it. (box paper crinkling)
Decent length for a cable.
Your wingspan is roughly your height.
So I'm about six one, oh,
well this is making me look like I'm five eight,
but I swear I'm six feet. Date me.
And you get a USB-A and there's the USB-C adaptor.
That is a very skinny,
look at how little material is outside
of the actual port there.
And having this adapter means that this cable
must be permanently attached.
That's actually really a bummer
because you can replace the cable on the M50x's.
Thank you. (headphones rustling)
This is a pair that we just had at work, they're David's.
They twist out and there, you can switch 'em.
It is a proprietary connector, which is kind of a bummer,
but at least it's a swapable.
- [David] They come to three different types of cables too.
- Oh, so they got a short, a long, and a coiled one
but what's weird is that on this box
there's two plugs, an XLR plug,
and that says that there's a quarter inch adapter.
So what's going on in this one.
- [David] That's unexpected. (laughs)
- There's the adapter.
Okay. No, so I get the logic here
because usually a lot of streamers will interface,
you plug this into their interface, right?
You'll have your GoXLR or whatever
and you'll have a cable for your headphones
and a cable for your microphone and you plug them into that.
It's just a little weird
compared to the simplicity of the USB cable.
Let's take a look around.
You have a leatherette headband with minimal padding
but they're also very light.
You have a ratchet adjustment on the side.
Outta the box they come with
a breathable nylon for the ear cup.
That's also a fake leather outside
whereas typically they just give you these pleather pads.
I found the M50x's to get pretty warm pretty quickly.
I don't personally find them
to be a very comfortable headset.
Though some people can wear them all day.
Your mileage may vary.
We have a monitor, volume, plus and minus.
I imagine this is for your side tone,
that's where you can hear yourself speak
through your own headphones.
It says push to monitor
and then you can turn the volume up or down.
That's actually a really nice addition
because sometimes headphones come with it
and you can only turn it on and off.
And I like the look of the microphone.
I like how it's got a metal grill on it,
it reminds me of like an old timey microphone.
It's flip to mute,
labeled right there where you gotta go past it.
There's also a distinct click.
It's a pretty simple all-in-one solution
and as much as we can bemoan the lack of features
if it does the things it wants to do really well
which is play music
and put sound in other people ear, good stuff.
And we'll find out how good they do
after I tell you a little secret of Secret Lab.
Thanks to Secret Lab for sponsoring this video.
Secret Lab chairs are designed to keep you comfortable
for those long nights of work and play.
Their TITAN Evo 2022 series chair
offers four-way lumbar support,
comes with a magnetic memory foam head pillow,
and is offered in different upholsterys
like Hybrid Leatherette, SoftWeave Fabric,
and NAPA Leather.
Best of all, a five year extended warranty is included
along with a 49 day return policy.
Head to the link of the description
to check out Secret Lab today.
Bada bing, bada boom.
The drivers are immediately recognized,
it's setting itself up.
I will say that this is kind of long, this whole situation.
I think what would've been nice
is if they included the adapter on here
as like if it was attached,
with a little the thing of rubber
so you could just take it off or on and you won't.
(stutters) You're gonna lose this.
I'm gonna plug into the other port.
And I immediately hear the side tone coming in
so I can hear myself talking.
Again, I can adjust it with the side buttons.
I can make it louder.
Oh, and it has a nice beat.
Ooh and now I have no side channel out
or I can just turn it off and I can turn it back on.
I'm gonna have it on 'cause it helps me.
I can't adjust the volume on my computer with it,
just for the side tone.
Audio wise, terms of listening, they sound the same.
It is a pair of Audio-Technica M50x's.
The microphone itself,
we're gonna do a quick little recording here.
This is a test recording to hear the sound
of the Audio-Technica M50xSTS-USB
and it is pretty quiet right now.
You'd have to kind of bump this up a little bit
in terms of volume.
Let's do a sinful Caesar sipped his snifter,
seized his knees and sneezed.
Pah, pah, cah, cah, fa, fa, fa, fa, tah.
To sit in solemn silence in a dull, dark, dock.
In a pestilential prison, with a life-long lock.
Awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp, shock.
From a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block.
Cool, let's take a listen.
Wow, okay, this sounds,
this is a really, really good microphone.
No setup raw into Audacity, I didn't do anything.
I didn't adjust it.
Obviously if you want to use this,
you can just adjust some of the settings,
especially from the mouth,
like I think I was peeking a little bit
because it was a little bit close to my mouth
but like that's really,
really, really good microphone for a headset.
This would be amazing for streaming
like it's a easy, easy mic setup.
It worked out of the box really well
and with just a few minor tweaks,
you can make it sound really, really quite good.
In terms of audio quality,
I'm not gonna spend a ton of time talking
about the Audio-Technica M50x's audio quality,
there's so many opinions out there on it.
For me they're a little bit basey and boomy,
they don't have the same kind of punch that I usually want
but they do have a great amount of like
energy in the bass that makes a lot of music
very, very fun to listen to.
They don't have the highest treble extension
nor are they the most resolving in terms of details.
But like 95% of what you play on these is gonna sound great.
If this is your first step into the entry level
audiophile area with high quality headphones,
you're gonna love these. They're just great.
There's a reason they're so highly recommended
and so widespread.
Or is there a little bit of overhype on them?
Yeah, but like they're an easy recommend,
you can always get them.
(soft playful music)
They sound good. (laughs)
But these are aimed at streamers and what do streamers do?
Uh, a lot of gaming.
So how are they as a gaming headset, let's play a game!
Positionality and sound stage are fine.
Like I wouldn't go to this headset exactly
if you're aiming for the most competitive gaming experience.
But like it is pretty good.
But you're not able to take advantage of anything like
virtual surround sound.
Like there's no DTS support or Dolby Atmos kind of stuff.
It's just a stereo headset so,
you're at the will of how well designed the sound engine is,
but it's not bad.
You could get better positional audio
and sound stage with an open-back.
But you have to deal with all of the caveats
of having an open-back headphone like you know, bleed.
Speaking of which these are decent at not letting sound in,
they don't have any sort of active noise canceling.
So you're still gonna hear a lot of higher,
or so you're still gonna hear a lot of like the mid sounds,
like human voices and stuff through them.
But that's just all my opinions,
I'm not some sort of robot or machine
that's specifically designed
to objectively measure headphones
and tell you exactly how they might sound.
That's what the labs is for.
So let's take a look at them charts.
♪ A do, do, do, do ♪
Something to note is that
you can get two different sets of pads
and since they are of different materials
they do affect the sound.
So using the nylon headsets, we can see right here
that this is a basey headphone.
Look at that bump at 300 hertz and below,
against our target, huge bump,
but it lacks a bit of the rumble in the subbase
and because it's the base shelf
is being applied at the 300 hertz mark
it sounds boomier than like rumbly
and it lacks a little bit of punch and nuance.
But as you can see in the mids,
it follows the curve very nicely
and it's a little bit of a mellower treble sound.
There's some peaks in the really high brilliance area
but if we're looking at the upper mids
and the presence section of the graph,
you will find that these will be a little bit relaxed
which is why people tend to say
that they're not the most detailed.
And then if we look at the leather,
it's a pretty big difference.
We lose a lot of that elevated boomy base
and it becomes a little bit tighter
with a greater dip just above 300 in the low mids.
To my ears, that dip in the mids is not as noticeable
as this chart might make it look.
And then we see that the treble response
isn't touched too much between the two materials
with maybe that dip at five to six K
but still it's a pretty good sounding headphone
with a little bit of color to it and a relaxed upper end.
So it's never gonna be fatiguing or tiring.
Here is our isolation charts,
so how well it blocks out other sounds.
What you're looking at is that zero line,
that's zero dB's of reduction.
As we go further negative,
we're seeing a greater and greater reduction.
Even with both pads,
reduction is really only in the high end stuff.
Stuff like active noise canceling helps out big time
in these mids and reduces kind of the
vibration or the resonance of voices
and can block stuff out,
but these don't have any of that so we don't get it.
And then here's the mic response.
As you can see, very, very good.
It's unlike our headphone curve,
the microphone target is a flat line.
Why is that?
Because we're looking at a compensated graph.
So the target for microphones is totally industry standard
and agreed upon, whereas when we're talking about headphones
the jury's still out on what the headphone target is,
so there's different machines for measuring
and all that stuff,
but everyone in the industry agrees
that microphones should sound a certain way.
You'll notice at the bottom
that there's a big roll off sub 100 hertz,
that doesn't really matter for a microphone
that's designed for the human voice
and actually can be a benefit
'cause you won't hear like any ambient rumbles.
So like that's a solid microphone,
that's a great microphone that you can use
for anything and you can trust
that it's giving a very, very accurate reproduction
of what you are actually sounding like.
The price of the ATH-M50x,
the normal non-headset version is 169.
So what kind of a premium is Audio-Technica tacking on
to the microphone clad headsets?
Well, if you buy the USB version,
it comes to a whopping price of 229.
So that's a $60 premium over the normal ones.
The XLR version, it comes in at just $200.
You don't really get a lot extra here.
As well as there's some sacrifices that I think
they just didn't need to make and I wish that they didn't.
Interchangeable cables, maybe a removable microphone,
just making these more versatile would be better.
What really would've been cool is if they just sold these
at the $230 price point and gave me interchangeable cables
so I just got the XLR cable and the USB cable.
That would've been a way better solution
and I'm really sad that they didn't go with that
because I think that these justify their price,
at least brand new.
But if you want something that's far more feature rich
that has multi-channel support,
spatial audio, and integrated EQ,
look at the SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro
which comes in at just $224 on Amazon right now.
It might not sound as good as this,
but it's a lot, a lot of creature comforts.
The other thing, what if you bought
a pair of these by themselves
and then maybe added an additional microphone?
Well, they've put in a really, really good mic
and I think the mic that they have attached here
makes this a really good value.
Think about the Antlion ModMic
which you can like tape to any headset you want.
Actually, the ModMic Uni uses this exact headphone
on their product page to display it,
but if you want the ModMic and the adapter
for USB, that's gonna cost you 93 bucks.
So this undercuts that by about 30 to $40,
which is really good.
At the end of the day,
Audio-Technica has created a great headset for gamers
whose highest priority
is great audio in both mic and headphone.
I can highly recommend, great.
Good job Audio-Technica. (smooches)
Thanks for watching. If you like this video,
why don't you check out another video
on the Drop + EPOS H3X, they're are another headphone
that's just focused on doing the basics
and they come in at a much cheaper price.
It's worth checkin' out.