I own the Orion Pros, been using them for a good few hours now.
Managed to get these from a British retailer who is selling the headsets a week or so early.
I can't compare it to the Vulcan's as i don't own a pair, they looked absolutely dreadful and online reviews say the active noise cancelling was detrimental to the sound quality and that the passive noise isolation was enough so i decided to go with the stylish looking Orion's instead 🙂
Here's my impressions of the Orion Pro so far:
So far the impressions have been highly positive.
The headphones are the most comfortable i've ever worn, however my ears do get warm after 10 minutes of use, not sweaty, just warm but i guess this simply cannot be avoided with ear pads that create a seal to block out noise (the main reason i got the headset).
The sound quality for games and music is superb and easily beat my Turtlebeech PX5's, the only sound aspect that lets this model down is the bass.
Whilst the bass is not particularly strong, it's not pathetically weak either, fine by me personally because i don't listen to heavy bass songs anyway.
The headset is very light (50g+ lighter than the Vulcan model) and the headband is very soft so after 3 hours of wearing the headset i have felt no pain on the top of my bald head so far.
My biggest grape with the headset is that the cable is not detachable yet the Asus Vulcan's is, i know the Orion isn't meant to be a 'high end' product but for something that has been designed to be more portable, fixing the cable to the device is a step backwards in my opinion.
Still the included 2.5m braided cable is very light and with the included cable tidy should make it easy enough to manage outside of the house, it still means that the cable / connection is not replaceable if it ever gets damaged through normal wear and tear.
This model is 20% cheaper than the Asus Vulcan Pro, thus it doesn't feature Active Noise Cancelling (which the majority of online reviews say is terrible to have on during gaming / listening to music anyway) and it doesn't have an included travel case.
It's a shame it doesn't come with a case as these headphones have clearly been designed to be far more portable than the Vulcan's and are stylish enough to use outside of the home.
Whilst the included Spitfire USB adapter adds power and different useful effects to the headset, it has its flaws.
Plugging the microphone into it resulted in absolutely diabolical microphone performance.
This was resolved by plugging the mic directly into my sound card and i've gone from sounding like i'm in a fishbowl to being told i've never sounded clearer.
Another issue with the adapter is background noise; to remove a lot of background static from the headset whilst plugged into the spitfire (when voice chatting, not music / game playing) the volume in Windows 7 has to be lowered to 66%.
It's still plenty loud, and if you plug the head directly into a sound card you can bring this up to 100% with no increase in background noise (although the sound quality will not be as good unless you have a decent sound card).
That's all i have to say about this model so far, i'll update this 'first impression' review as time goes by.
I look forward to trying these out over the weekend 😄
