Plantronics GameCom 777

Although Plantronics originally specialised in professional communication equipment, the brand has been releasing consumer-oriented products for a while now. As the name suggests, the GameCom range is aimed primarily at gamers.

Design: bring on the bulk

If one thing's for sure, it's that the 777 is a heavyweight headset. Its very bulky design is similar to Logitech's G-series models and it's certainly not a sleek, dainty piece of headwear.

However, the GameCom 777 actually feels quite light and discreet once on your head, even if we would have preferred a more comfortable and higher-quality material used to pad the headband and earpads. We're not big fans of this fuzzy faux-velvet stuff.

The microphone can be adjusted freely (see insert), and there's a remote control on the cable featuring volume buttons and microphone mute controls. However, we're starting to think that Logitech's idea of moving the controls onto one of the earphones could actually be a more practical way of doing things.

Audio Quality: beware of Dolby Axon

We regularly see two recurring problems with spatial sound technology. First of all, it's often poorly configured, overusing and over-abusing 2D effects. Second, it tends to overemphasise extremely high frequencies, also adding a strong reverberation. Obviously, the impression of space is improved, but the sound's authenticity is affected and any precise positioning of sound becomes pretty much impossible.

That's exactly the problem here. You can hear what the Dolby chip is trying to do, striving to create a spatial effect, but you soon find yourself lost in a big messy mass of noise. Locating the exact position of someone who's chasing after you in a game, for example, therefore becomes tricky.

In plain old stereo mode, however, this headset is actually quite good. It offers deep bass and a good, coherent, well-defined overall output. It's not up there with a pair of hi-fi headphones, but it's still a very good headset for gamers. The GameCom 777 can even be connected via an analogue cable, which can help prevent overloading your computer's processor with another USB connection (especially since it doesn't have real benefit here).

Underneath it all, the GameCom 777 is a good basic headset that can't handle spatial effects properly. Wanting to advertise 7.1 sound on the packaging at all costs really shouldn't push manufacturers to rush half-heartedly into using poor spatial effects. It's a shame too, as a decent spatial sound mode could have brought real added-value to the Plantronics GameCom 777's excellent stereo mode.