In the past few years I’ve been through a fair few headsets, I break them very easily, I’m either careless with them, or I’m straight up angry at my performance in a game and the headset suffers for it. When I’ve come to replace a headset, I’ve always opted for a wired one, because wireless, to me, has always presented the issues of lag, battery life, and overall quality, I’ve used them in the past and they’ve given me nothing but issues.
I’ve always said I’d definitely use one again, but I’d need some convincing that they’d improved, enter the RIG 700HS from Poly.
The 700HS promises in big letters on the box – Lag-free wireless with 12-hour gameplay, bold words, and I’m certainly skeptical about any wireless headset being truly lag-free. It’s also worth noting that whilst this is a specifically designed for PS4 headset, it’s also compatible with PC, so for the purposes of reviewing, it was tested on Windows 10.
Inside the box is the headset itself, the wireless receiver, a microphone attachment, an optical cable and your instruction manuals, so it’s fairly standard stuff.
The first thing you’ll notice about this headset is that it lacks any RGB or other aesthetically pleasing but ultimately pointless features on a headset, Poly seems to be a firm believer in performance over aesthetics and prefers to impress you with the quality of the headset rather than how many flashy lights they can cram onto the sides.
Taking the headset out of the box I’m shocked by how light this thing actually is, it’s practically weightless and that’s a big plus for someone like me who wears one for many an hour in front of the computer, it didn’t hurt my head at all and it didn’t feel like I was wearing a headset at all, honestly.
If, like me, you’ve got a meathead, you can adjust the headset to fit your head by popping off the ear cups and moving them up or down these handy slots on the side of the headset so the cups fit comfortably around your ears. The headset itself flexes pretty well to adjust to your head and there’s a layer of foam along the headband.
The ear cups aren’t the biggest so if you have quite big ears you may struggle, but they’re lined with this breathable fabric that looks and feels like leather but has all the breathability of fabric so your ears don’t sweat when you’re 15 hours into a World of Warcraft session. No, I’m definitely not speaking from experience.
Setting the headset up is as easy as plug and play, the receiver is a standard USB and once this in you just need to turn the headset on and it automatically pairs, in my case Windows picked up the drivers and immediately set it as my default sound device so I had very little to actually do.
Jumping into the functionality, like I said I’ve been skeptical of the wireless headset for many-a-reason but the 700HS blows all of my concerns out of the water, the headset is crystal clear and there’s absolutely zero lag on it at all, oftentimes I’d have to check and make sure I wasn’t wearing a wired headset, this thing is absolutely flawless and even moving around the room I saw no drops in signal or latency at all, it really baffled me. The 40mm drivers pack some serious power and the bass that the headset puts out really gives the headset an all-round immersive experience.
On the side of the headset you’ve got a couple of audio wheels, these help for adjusting overall volume on the fly, but you also have a second one for the purpose of favoring your voice chat over game volume, a feature not really used on PC but I imagine this would be really useful on the PS4.
There’s a drawback to this headset and it’s the microphone, if you don’t have a separate microphone you’re going to want for quality, however thankfully if you don’t wish to use it the microphone disconnects completely and you’re fine, my suggestion is to have a separate microphone as the built-in one doesn’t really pack a punch.
Overall, I love this headset, it’s light, functional and it changes the way I feel about wireless headsets completely, I definitely think I’ll pick one up in the future, and with a price point of around £120 you’re not going to break the bank for some serious quality, I, like many others, spend hundreds if not thousands on quality peripherals and for some reason then decide to top all that off with a cheap £15 headset that’ll break after a month, Poly is out to show you that you don’t need fancy RGB lights on your ears to signal quality, you just need the right construction.
Thanks to Poly for sending me this headset for the review!
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