Plantronics’ Rig 500E gaming headset is lightweight, easy to customise and capable of some boneshaking audio — pretty much everything you might want in a gaming headset.
It’s been a number of years since I’ve reviewed a specifically gaming headset, specifically the Plantronics Rig 500E’s ancestor, simply called the Plantronics Rig. Its claim to fame was connecting up multiple devices no matter how many cables it took, but the Rig 500E is a significantly more streamlined critter, fundamentally pitched at the PC gaming crowd.
Its big claim to fame is how intensely customisable it is. The Rig 500E Plantronics supplied to me for review was the “E-Sports” edition (I’ve never felt closer to being an actual sportsperson, which is a big admission coming from, well, me), which comes with four headphone cups. It’s not so much that Plantronics is pitching at that valuable quadraphonically-able-alien market as it is enabling a set of headphones that really can fit any particular head and comfort level. One set of cups offers noise isolation and slightly better audio, while the other allows more air flow for a cooler and lighter feel on your ears. I found that while many headphones end up a sweaty mess on my head no matter what that the noise isolating cups were more comfortable anyway, but it’s nice to have the choice.
Comfort is something I struggle with testing pretty much any headphone set, because all too often I either find them too tight, or way too hot after any lengthy period of use. The two pairs of cups can click into any of three positions on the supplied band, which means, yes, you can get silly and put one up high and one down low if you must, but realistically, it means that even within the generous stretch of the band itself, you’re all but guaranteed to find a comfortable fit.
Connectivity is via either the standard 3.5mm plug on the cable, or if you plug it into the surround sound 7.1 connector, via standard USB. Dolby Surround sound — or to be more strictly accurate, virtual surround sound, because you’re still just talking two speakers on either side of your head — is the Rig 500E’s other claim to fame. You can switch it on or off via the inline remote depending on your taste.
Virtual surround sound is always a tricky thing to judge, because it depends what you throw at it, and what your own tolerances for audio are. Testing with games — its natural constituency, after all — showed it off to the best extent, giving some definite shapes to explosions and depth to overall game audio in pretty much every game I threw it at. The supplied mic is of the boom type, and while it’s rather short (insert your own jokes here), those I gamed with had no complaints about its audio pickup for in-game duties.
For more regular audio use — and it’s fair to argue that if you’re going the kind of money that Plantronics wants for the RIG 500E you’re going to want to use it a fair amount — the surround sound effect tended to introduce a rather hollow effect to a lot of lyrical music as it tried to recreate a surround effect. Again, that’ll vary by material and isn’t the key market the Rig 500E tries to address, and you can always switch it off if you find it annoying for your source audio.
The Rig 500E is an excellent headset, and I find that I’ve only got one very minor other complaint with it. Oddly, it’s much the same one I had with its predecessor, and that’s to do with cabling. It’s a universal rule of computing cables that they will by nature wrap and loop around anything and everything they can manage to snake around.
The Rig 500E’s basic 3.5mm cable is relatively short, and for many might even be too short to be practical. Plug in the USB adaptor — and if you’re paying for it, you might as well use it — and you get a lot more cable to play with, but that also equates to a lot more cable to get tangled around everything else. It’s minor, but I could easily see the cable being an irritant if you’re a big LAN party fanatic or similar and want to take your headphones with you. I guess it’s a good way to learn to keep your cables neat and tidy, but who wants to be reminded about keeping things tidy when you just want to blast stuff?
The Plantronics Rig 500E’s typical RRP is around $199, but at the time of writing it can be bought via EB Games for $167.
Ultimately, the Plantronics Rig 500E offers an excellent gaming audio experience, both in audio and comfort terms, and is highly recommended.