Cruiser P3210 PS3/PS4/PC Gaming Headset

June 17th, 2014 by

p3210

Manufacturer: GamesterGear
Current Retail Price: $109.99 US

These days you can’t toss an SD card in an electronics store without hitting seven or eight gaming headsets of varying prices and quality. Whether they claim to have virtual surround sound, true surround sound, or enough bass to permanently damage the hearing of three generations of your ancestors, they all have a gimmick or two between their earpads. One particular feature missing from our expansive collection of gaming headsets has been really powerful bass, so we were very interested to test out GamesterGear’s P3210s when they showed up on our doorstep. Spouting “Bass Quake” technology that is meant to let you “physically experience audio while gaming” and “feel vibrations or changes in the environment”, the P3210 headset sounded like it would perfectly fill the heavy bass void that was existing in our gaming lives. Did the P3210s rock our world? Read on to find out.

At first glance the P3210s are decently striking with nice metallic-looking grills and blue accents on each ear, but once you handle them the unfortunate reality of the cheap plastic their main frame is comprised of becomes immediately apparent. This is not a headset that could stand being tossed in rage or being sat on by anyone larger than, say, Danny DeVito. If you’re someone who is even moderately rough with their gaming hardware, don’t be surprised if you accidentally bifurcate them in the course of your gaming.

Putting on the P3210s is a decidedly more pleasant story. Their “cloth ear pads”, coupled with the pad on the headband and the lightness of the unit’s plastic structure combine to make a very comfortable headset indeed. Once you start climbing in price, headsets of both the gaming and non-gaming variety often start to get bulky until you push through the $1000 barrier, after which you can get headphones that basically do everything shy of making you breakfast, but the questionable plastic of the P3210s in this case happily make them lighter than many of their direct competitors and can often feel like you’re not even wearing them at all.

The P3210’s cable ended up being a bit different from what I was expecting. From the very end featuring the split USB and 3.5mm headphone jack it goes into a surprisingly thick flattened cable until it hits the inline sound controls (whose features are basically standard for this kind of headset: Mic on/off, game volume, chat volume, and bass level) whereupon it turns into a more traditional cord for a couple of feet until it reaches the unit-proper. When running the cord across a living room, the extra heft afforded by the flattened length of the cord can often get in the way of placing it properly because it can’t hang from the edge of a sofa in the same way a lighter cord would. When using the headset in a PC gaming setup, though, the cord’s extra bulk matters little and is a non-issue during use unless your PC is unusually far away from you for some reason.

Connectivity for the P3210s is an interesting story. While they naturally function fine with all of their proscribed devices (PS4, PS3, and PC) (with the notable exception that the PS4/PS3 compatibility relies on the arcane method of requiring AV cables to be hooked up to the systems and an adapter to be attached to the red/white audio cables to provide you with your audio), they can also be used (minus full chat/microphone compatibility) with any device that has a way to get audio to a 3.5mm jack and a USB port to power them.  With this in mind, I ended up primarily using the P3210s with our surround sound receiver, utilizing the USB port meant for connecting devices with media to play to power them and a 3.5mm to ¼ inch adapter plug (see picture below). With the exception of the questionable console connectivity method, the P3210s performed admirably in every scenario I threw at them.

P3210-receiver

Sound quality, arguably the most important aspect of any audio product, is generally above-average with the P3210s. Featuring a 50mm primary driver and a dedicated 30mm bass driver in each ear provides a notable boost in audio clarity, immediacy, and volume over most headsets with smaller or singular drivers, but only just. While I enjoyed the quality of the sound coming from the P3210s, it seemed like any advantages it had over more expensive 40mm driver headsets came only from the fact that the driver was larger, not that it was better quality or more finely engineered. I feel that there is a lot more potential for performance in a 50mm/30mm dual-driver setup that is not realized through the P3210s, but as they are they are still an improvement any way you look at them.

For a headset with dedicated bass drivers and much-touted “Bass Quake” technology, I found that the P3210s were still underwhelming on the bass front. With the bass dial turned up all the way, the headset’s bass production lacks presence and character in all but the most bass-heavy media. Playing games like Mario Kart 8 and listening to 80’s and electronic music on my Macbook Pro I was beginning to think that the Bass Quake feature was broken in the headset I was given. It wasn’t until I tried watching some extreme action movies and playing games like Watch Dogs and Far Cry 3 that the headset started to rumble a bit. At its best the rumble was an ear-tickling distraction and at its worst it actually interfered with the bass reproduction more than it helped. I found that if I backed the bass dial off to about 85% instead of full blast I got the best compromise between head-buzzing and actual half-decent low sound.  Compared to other popular headphones like Sony’s Pulse Elite, the Creative Aurvana Live!, and Tritton’s Pro+ I really can’t say that the P3210s outperform or even match the levels of bass reproduction in competing products.  All of the others I listed are also capable of producing a similar, if somewhat less distracting, “rumble” effect when maxed-out.

All in all, the P3210s are an extremely comfortable and very good sounding headset if you’re prepared for the inconvenience of hooking them up to a PS4/PS3’s AV cables or forego the chat functionality in favour of a much more convenient connection.  The difference an extra 10mm on the primary driver and an additional large bass driver make on audio quality is considerable, even if the P3210s don’t use this extra power as well as they could.

[taq_review]

A review unit was provided to us by its manufacturers.