Corsair Vengeance 1400 Review

Performance

Beginning with a selection of music, we immediately noticed that Corsair has placed most emphasis on lower frequencies; a typical trait of gaming headsets. The bass won't blow you away, nor is it overdriven to the point of distortion, but it's warm and pleasant – we consistently found the low end of our tracks to be the most obvious and enjoyable. While mid and high frequencies certainly aren't mushy or muffled, they do lack a little detail and clarity, which isn't aided by the strong bass presence. When compared to listening on Qpad's headset, which excels at higher frequencies, many of our tracks sounded slightly flatter and less dynamic.

The headset's sound signature lends itself better to films and games than music. The relative lack of emphasis on treble was still noticeable by comparison, but rarely detracted from the overall experience. The large bass sounds give action sequences oomph, but some of the finer details might be missed. Nevertheless, we had no issue hearing the voices of team-mates or picking out the footsteps of enemies in competitive shooters, for example.


The Vengeance 1400 doesn't go as loud as other headsets we've heard, but it should be loud enough for most. There's a touch of distortion at the very highest volumes, but below that everything checks out. There's not much leakage from the closed back earcups, but there's still more than with the leather coated earcups of the QH-90 or Asus Vulcan.

Conclusion

For a little less money, the Vengeance 1400 would be easy to recommend – it's a very comfortable and adjustable headset with decent build quality and mostly accurate sound reproduction, even if it is a little bass heavy. Unfortunately, however, with Qpad's excellent QH-90 now just £70 at some places, the Vengeance 1400 is left in its shadow – it's great in many ways, but the Qpad model is better in nearly every one of them, and for an analogue headset in this price range it remains our firm favourite. That said, if you can pick the Vengeance 1400 up cheaper in a sale, or if you prefer a bass heavy sound signature or velveteen rather than leather ear padding, Corsair's headset would still be a sensible purchase.