Is it possible to play with plugs: a review of the in-ear gaming headset Creative Sound BlasterX P5

In-ear gaming headphones are quite rare, and only a few companies make them. In addition to the Creative Sound BlasterX P5, you can recall the Razer Hammerhead, Steelseries Flux, Thermaltake Isurus, Roccat Aluma and, probably, everything. Other plugs are positioned as universal, and therefore they cannot be called exclusively gaming.

The peculiarity of all esports headsets is that they are designed primarily to create maximum comfort during hours of gaming sessions and the best orientation in the in-game space. This requires sophisticated design, high precision assembly and quality materials. The consequence of this approach to production is the ability to perform well not only in games, but also when playing music.

Simply put, any normal gaming headset is music lover by default, and the cost of 4,990 rubles is no exception.

in-ear headphones Creative Sound BlasterX P5

Convenience and reliability

The in-ear form factor is the lightest type of headphone available. The total weight of the Sound BlasterX P5 is only 12 grams, with most of it being made up of wires, plug and remote control.

A typical full-size headset weighs around 300 grams. No matter how well thought out its design, this mass will still press on the head and neck. No matter how high-quality the material of the ear pads is, the skin from them still sweats. Especially during intense games. Especially in hot weather and in stuffy rooms.

Talking some time ago with a professional League of Legends cyber athlete Vyacheslav Egorov, I learned that athletes of this level devote 10 to 14 hours a day to training. They play even more during tournaments. Now imagine that all this time you have a heavy full-size headset on your head, from which your ears are sweating …

The light weight and compactness of the plugs often become the determining factors when choosing a headset for a gaming laptop, because carrying around headphones that take up more space than the computer itself is nonsense.

The Sound BlasterX P5 has a sleek, tapered design with slightly angled speaker outputs. This allows the earbuds to be lightly pressed with one side against the external auditory canal, providing additional support.

The headset uses unusual ear cushions with coiled ribs.

These flexible spacers increase the elasticity of the earplugs and, when properly sized, completely isolate from ambient sounds without unpleasant pressure on the inner ear.

in-ear headphones: ear pads of different sizes

Anyone who has ever been to an e-sports stadium can imagine how noisy it is. At decisive moments, viewers literally go crazy. At these same moments, it is especially important for players to hear what is happening in the game in order to take the only correct action in a split second and drag the match. Perfect sound insulation is indispensable here. That is why athletes use earplugs, and sometimes even wear another full-size headset over it. Just to block out the roar of the crowd and hear something.

In everyday life, good noise isolation helps you focus on the gameplay regardless of the environment. Mobile gamers appreciate the plugs for the ability to get rid of the sounds of the subway and other transport. Family people sometimes want to protect themselves from the hustle and bustle of the house for a short while. In-ear headphones are ideal for these situations.

When used for its intended purpose, the Sound BlasterX P5 is reliable. Firstly, the load on a kink during the game is extremely rare, and secondly, when you try to break the wire, the headphone plug will simply pop out of the adapter, with which the headset is connected to a computer or laptop.

Some concerns arise when connecting to a smartphone. Although the weak points at the wire joints are reinforced with long rubber tubes, the straight design of the plug itself is not very reliable. Constant bending of the leg, if you carry a smartphone with a connected headset in a pocket of jeans or trousers, will lead to a break in even the most tenacious cable. No braiding will help here. It would be wiser to use the L-shaped plug.

Sound

Obviously, even the most sophisticated in-ear headphones cannot compete with full-size ones in low frequencies. If the previously considered Sound BlasterX Tournament Edition has 50 mm speakers, then these plugs have a diameter of the radiators of only 7 mm.

Physical limitations affect bass power, but not quality. The headset covers the range from 10 Hz to 23 kHz, that is, it faithfully reproduces even very low sounds, it just does it in a more balanced way.

On the plus side, the Sound BlasterX P5 has excellent detailing in the midrange and the absence of oversaturation at the top. High frequencies that stand out against the general background are characteristic of many compact headphones, but in this case the headset gives an even sound without preliminary tuning and using the BlasterX Acoustic Engine.

BlasterX Acoustic Engine is Creative's proprietary software, which is a collection of pre-configured sound profiles for popular genres and selected games. For example, in shooters, the program increases the emphasis on shooting and explosions, in single-player adventure games like The Witcher 3, on the environment.

A distinctive feature of the Sound BlasterX P5 is its amazingly accurate sound direction. The headset is still a gaming headset and is used primarily to understand the in-game environment, and therefore the ability to correctly indicate to the player where steps and shots are coming from is very important for it.

In practice, in Battlefield 1 and 4, I was able to predict the position of an impersonating opponent with an accuracy of about two hours. For such a compact headset without USB emulation of multichannel sound, this is a very good indicator.

Another person, rather far from gaming, also drew attention to the accuracy of the transmission of the direction of sound. In particular, when listening to a high-quality concert recording, he not only heard sounds from the audience, but also understood from which side and from what approximately distance they were coming.

Microphone

The Sound BlasterX P5 uses an omnidirectional electret microphone located on the cable to the left earpiece.

A familiar audio engineer or "" will tell you what electret microphones are and how they differ from ordinary ones. In short, this type of design allows for clearer sound, comparable to the dedicated microphones of full-size headsets.

In practice, the partners heard me loud and clear. There were no complaints about the voice quality.

Control

The Sound BlasterX P5 remote control does not feature an abundance of functions.

It houses the only music and call control button, as well as a microphone switch.

The lack of volume control buttons can be explained by the fact that during the game, the user usually controls the sound directly on the computer or mobile device, and therefore he does not need another remote control. This fact will surely upset music lovers, but the headset is still a gaming headset and is tailored for something else.

Conclusion

As you can see, in-ear gaming headsets have a right to exist, and in certain situations they bypass their full-size brothers in terms of practicality. They allow you to completely isolate yourself from the surrounding noise, are convenient for transportation, do not put pressure on your head and are not inferior in the accuracy of transmitting the direction of sound.