In fact, for a gaming headset the A50 is still pretty damn decent. $300 soundĪnd if there’s one place I think Astro should’ve put in more work, it’s the A50’s sound. This sorted the issue, but I still don’t know why it happened in the first place. The solution (after contacting Astro) turned out to be a hard reset, holding down the Dolby and Game buttons for 15 seconds. Sitting in the base station? Fully charged and paired. 3) I had one instance where the A50 refused to stay on. I’ve also noticed occasional interference sitting at my desk, which is weird. If I walk into the next room (10-15 feet), my A50 occasionally drops. 2) Astro loves to tout its 5GHz transmitter, which is all well and good except for range and penetration. If you’re using a standing desk, good luck. 1) Continuing in the Astro tradition, the base station comes with a ridiculously short three-foot USB cable. (There’s also a battery indicator on the front of the base station, and Astro’s made it so you can disable the low-battery beeps if they drive you nuts.) (The old A50 did six or seven hours, max.) I can’t attest to Astro’s figures directly, because it’s astonishingly hard to test a headset’s battery when it powers off automatically after 30 seconds on a desk, but I’ll say I’ve gotten two or three long days of gaming in without charging it or having it die. I am a bit worried about the base station’s durability-those charging capabilities are governed by some fragile-feeling contacts sitting in the bottom-but it’s one of the most elegant charging solutions I’ve seen for a wireless headset, solving the “I just put these on and already the low-battery indicator is beeping” problem I had with the previous A50.Īlso helping: better battery life in general, with the new A50 matching the 12-15 hour claims of headsets like the G933 and Razer’s Man O’ War. To pair, you simply drop the A50 into the base station you want to use. (Side note: Astro’s going to sell base stations for $100 standalone later this year, and you can use one headset with both stations. It goes on the stand, it’s charged all the time. I never worry about whether it’s charged, I never worry about where to place it. It’s made the A50 experience even more frustration-free. But when you’re done with your A50? You simply drop it onto the base station and it starts charging-plus it looks pretty. At eight inches long, four inches wide, and an inch tall, this is a hefty piece of hardware to toss on your desk. The new A50 makes the base station an installation in its own right. Astro’s done some tweaking though, changing the power button to a slider (a huge improvement on the previous A50’s miniscule on/off button) and adding a Dolby toggle above the three-way EQ slider. Placement is similar-game/chat mixer on the right face, volume wheel and assorted buttons on the rear of the right cup.
The main changes to the headset are more subtle, and reside mostly with the built-in controls. I went black and blue, because I think the Xbox-themed version is ugly, but it’s your call. The A50 comes in two familiar color schemes for 2016: black and blue for Sony’s PS4, gray and green for Microsoft’s Xbox One.Īnd if you plan to use the A50 with a PC? The choice is entirely irrelevant. Put your old A50 and the new A50 next to each other and they look practically identical, aside from color. The result is a bit more timeless than, say, the neon-hued extravagance of some of Razer’s early headsets. They’re compact, sleek, and embrace Astro’s gaming pedigree while retaining a certain high-end (read: adult) look. It’s a showy design, a relic of the edgy gamer-centric ethos of the mid-2000s with its sharp angles and flashy highlights-and yet I still think the A50s are attractive, in their own way. The ears and headband are soft-touch plastic, fairly lightweight, and joined by two exposed metal pipes with the cable casually coiled inside. Design-wise, the A50 plays twin to its predecessor.