Sennheiser Product Specialist Interview
Sennheiser is a company synonymous with quality in the audio industry with many gamers sporting headsets of this name and swearing by their quality. At CES 2012, we caught up with Sennheiser Product Specialist Eric Palonen. In this interview we discuss the brand new Sennheiser XBOX 360 headsets that are sure to make waves in the console gaming community, in addition to other topics about one of the world’s most popular headset brands.
GI: I’m a the Sennheiser booth at CES 2012, and if you can give me your name and what you do at Sennheiser.
EP: My name is Eric Palonen and I am a Product Specialist.
GI: You had a big announcement with the x320, the XBOX 360 headset, tell us everything that’s new here at CES 2012.
EP: That’s correct. Sennheiser’s long done PC gaming headsets and of course we’re pretty famous for microphones and headphones. And we said “Alright, we’ve got to get into this Xbox category and let’s make a big splash.” So the x320 is everything you’d expect out of a Sennheiser headphone and microphone but optimized of course to connect directly to the Xbox 360.
GI: The first thing I noticed when I picked it up is that the thing weighs like less than a feather – it’s crazy. How do you marry weight with sound quality?
Sennheiser x320 Headset
EP: Exactly. If it’s not comfortable you won’t wear it, and if it doesn’t sound good you won’t wear it either for that long. So it is difficult to do but our team of engineers is fantastic of course working with the existing headphone technology we have. And then of course you want to port it to a lightweight chassis. The x320 is a great example of what we’re absolutely capable of, and that is in fact high quality but still being lightweight and sounding good. One of the key secrets here is the open design. It’s a ported design that breathes and circulates air, and you reduce a lot of weight that way as well.
GI: Yeah, it allows you to certainly wear them a lot longer. I’ve had my 555s for a number of years. I still use them, swear by them, and I like that open air design just because I can wear them longer because they breathe. It’s good to see that the console market gamers aren’t so different from us PC gamers.
EP: Exactly. And in fact console gaming has really come a long way. It used to be only PC gamers at the LAN tournaments, but Xbox 360 has such a huge thriving online gaming community we want them to use our products. So we said “Hey, let’s bring them to the trade shows and show people what they’re all about,” and they’ve embraced them with open arms.
GI: One cool thing that I was showed was the piece that attaches that allows you to raise or lower both the music and the gamer-to-gamer speech volumes.
EP: We actually call this a mixer. If you want to look it up and get a visual of it, it plugs into your USB port in your Xbox and there’s a lead of cable, and that comes out and allows you to mix the amount of in-game audio as well as in-game chat audio. So you can fine tune if you want to hear more of your teammates’ voices or less, or more in-game audio. And there’s also a selectable bass boost so if you want to add a little excitement, a little spice to the games you listen to you can certainly do that at the touch of a button.
GI: Yeah, it’s really convenient that just with my thumb here, I want more game audio – I flip that up; if I want more chat audio, whatever I want. I love the customization. I was also looking at the mic – up, down. I was actually told that the ESPN broadcast headset technology there was put into place: when you flip that mic up it auto mutes.
EP: That’s correct. We have a very long lineage in broadcast headsets. If you ever watch a sports broadcast you’ll see Sennheiser headsets at work – that’s what all the color commentators wear. And one of our more recent designs we decided to make mic muting very easy – simply flip the microphone up to mute it and flip it down when you want to be able to speak. You can feel a quiet click and that indicates that you’ve either muted it or unmuted it. And it’s really quick; you don’t have to fumble and reach for an inline control or hit a hot key or pause the game. It allows you to, at the flip of a switch to control it.
GI: It’s great to see Sennheiser just jumping into the console market. On the PC side, any big announcements? I’m seeing the PC 360, a gorgeous line of headsets, here as well.
EP: The PC 360 was launched last year right at the same time and it’s been still a big hit for us. So we like to show it at the shows because by all means, the audio quality coming out of that piece is just phenomenal.
GI: Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Great to see you guys and I appreciate your time.
EP: Thank you very much. Thanks for having us.
Gaming Illustrated would like to thank Sennheiser and Eric Palonen for this interview.
