Shiny, sturdy, and sounds great
As mentioned before, the PC 350 is a looker. After handling it for a few moments, it also becomes very clear that it’s well constructed and it just strikes you as a well-designed product in its entirety — comfortable, sturdy, and nice to look at.
The padded headband is very soft, as are the ear pads which cover your ears fully and block out a solid amount of outside noise. And it shouldn’t matter if you’re an 11-year old or a giant, the 12 different size settings make sure it fits everyone.
The noise-cancelling microphone is adjustable from the middle so you can have it as far or as close to your mouth as you prefer. The microphone of course also folds up, so when not in use, you can push it out of the way with a quick flick of a wrist.
As this is a headset designed for pro-gamers, making the entire thing collapsible so it can be taken to ass-whooping tours is a nice touch. And unlike most collapsible headsets that collapse into a kind of a ball shape, Sennheiser has approached this from another angle and has made the PC 350 take up much less space in its collapsed form when placed parallel with a flat surface, making it great to stick into a backpack with your other gear.
The volume control that’s on the wire, which also has an on/off button for the microphone, has a clip on the back which can be used to attach the volume control to your shirt pocket for example. One thing to note, and this purely comes down to personal preference, is that the volume control should have been flipped around — if you look down at it while your headset is on, it’s upside-down and thus a bit awkward to use.
As the visual inspection was done, there was nothing left to do but plug the headset into a sound card and see how it performs its primary functions, which I’m happy to say it did very well. After listening to many hours of music, having some Sound Recorder fun in Windows and playing plenty of Beyond Good & Evil, F.E.A.R. Combat, Far Cry, and co-op Ghost Recon (where I was, in fact, “in command” at times), I have to say I’m having a hard time coming up with anything to moan about — the sound was always crystal clear, no order went misunderstood during co-op play, and the bass reproduction was nothing short of excellent.
