Creative Sound Blaster Arena Surround

Sound Blaster has come a long way from being the first expansion card that brought audio to PCs in 1989. Today, it is still the de facto standard when it comes to PC audio, especially with discerning users. Now, if you're wondering why the Sound Blaster brand exists on this headset, the main reason is that it also includes the necessary audio hardware to hook it up with any computer with a free USB port.

Design And Features

The headset itself is bathed in white, with black cushions providing the color contrast. The plastic frame looked very thin and felt cheap, but the rest of the components seemed to be of higher quality. The ear cups cushions are made of very soft pleather. Unfortunately, they are not made to be replaceable. The headband gets the same pleather material that graces the ear cups. Overall, these cushions provide an extremely comfortable fit. Despite its full-sized construction, this headset only got hot after wearing it for hours of gaming.

The headset's boom mic is mounted on the left side and can be rotated upwards when not needed. It is also detachable from the headset entirely. The boom structure can be bent and adjusted as well to fit most face shapes, but we found it a tad too flexible, which caused the mic to bounce off our face if we made any sudden head movements. The 250cm cable is generous enough for running from the USB port at the back of our PC. However, laptop users may find the cable length excessive, and there's no provided cable management solution.

The in-line control box comes with a volume buttons and a microphone mute slider switch. It also has a clip on the back so you can attach it to your clothes. The circular LED indicator shows the status of the mic. It will blink if the mic mute switch is set to on, and will remain steadily lit if the mic is active. Unlike most headsets, the volume controls on the Arena are able to control the system volume directly.

Performance

The Arena Surround works with both Windows and Mac platforms without requiring any driver or software installation. However, to enjoy the surround sound processing, it is necessary to install the Creative software provided on the included CD. However, the software is not supported on the Mac.

The Entertainment Console is where the user is able to adjust all the different settings of the headset, from the EAX environment effects to adjusting the X-Fi or surround sound levels. Without the software installed, the Arena Surround sounded well-balanced throughout the spectrum, although the bass response was a tad bit more than what we liked. It handled most of the music we threw at it nicely, but we found our jazz tracks losing a fair bit of their smoothness when we heard them though the Arena Surround.


Installing the Creative software though gave a different listening experience. First off was a bass boost button, which calls up a screen where we could adjust the bass boost levels by decibel gain, and set the cutoff frequency for the high pass filter. Despite the slightly bassy nature, we found our preferred setting for a 6dB gain with the cutoff frequency at 30Hz. At this configuration, the explosions in games as well as the thundering roar of engines didn't faze the headset much but we did manage to hear distortion when we cranked the volume up.

On the other hand, the surround audio didn't really sound all that convincing with stereo sources, nor with our AC3-encoded test files. The workaround we chanced upon was to trick Windows into believing that it’s a 5.1-speaker setup instead of the default headphone setting. With that speaker setting and the CMSS-3D headphone at 50 percent, the virtual listening space is increased.

Although we were able to positively pinpoint the different musical instruments in the Orchestra Dolby 5.1 surround sound test track, the rear instruments sounded very close to the listener. Instruments in front had no such issues. In games, however, with the surround sound enabled, the sound field was vastly more engaging in Call of Duty or GRID: Race Driver. While there were times that the CMSS made the rear sounds a bit strange, the faults of the sonic placement were barely audible over the wide listening field. However, the improvement was limited with games or media without any surround sound support. It sounded very wide but lacked the surround sound effect.

The noise-cancelling mic does a decent job of reducing noise with the Silencer feature on, and we were particularly fond of using the VoiceFX voice morphing feature to annoy our friends over Skype conversations. Like the Logitech G330 we reviewed earlier, the noise-cancelling feature was able to reduce the ambient drones of air conditioning units, but it let in some of the wind noise generated by our fan.

Conclusion

At S$159 (US$127.75), it's not too a monstrous amount to pay for an all-in-one audio system which includes a USB soundcard and a pretty decent headset. However, the build quality leaves room for improvement with the cheap, thin plastic used. That said, it's very comfortable and the audio quality for gaming and movies is very good. Besides, you're paying more for the surround sound features that most other headsets don't have, and it works.