Introduction

Audio in games is still a much overlooked area in my opinion. When a new game appears it always seems to be about the graphics first then the game play second, but there's nothing I loathe more than a generally good game which is let down by its music and audio. So for me, my audio output quality has to be top notch. Along side this is the audio input quality, since many games nowadays support communications systems. Unreal Tournament 2004 for one has its own built-in communications software. Clearly noticing this growing requirement for good quality audio, and communications capabilities, Icemat have added to their Icemat Audio products by producing such a headset: the Icemat Audio Siberia.

Manufacturer: Icemat
Price: €69.00 (~£47.00)

The first thing that's obvious is that this is not your usual dull looking set of headphones. Icemat could be criticized for cashing in on the iPod's popularity by partly mimicking its colour scheme, but I don't think that's the case, especially since the application is quite different and the Icemat Audio range is stark white on the whole (as was the first Icemat itself). I personally think the strong white and black contrast is a good look and distinctive in its own right - after all, Apple hardly own the copyright on the colour white... although I'm sure they've tried to get it. For those of you who aren't so fond of the white look in the first place, you'll be happy to know that Icemat now produce an all-black version of this product, which would personally suit my all-black PC better.

The package contains the headphones themselves, a set of cables of a good length and contain the clip-on microphone and in-line volume control, a headphone size converter jack and a Velcro mounting bracket for the microphone. On first glance it appears that the cables are actually moulded together, but the microphone cable is actually clipped to the headphone cable (with in-line volume control) so this enables a little flexibility in how the microphone is deployed. The microphone itself has an on-off switch built into it so it can be easily disabled. There's also the obligatory advertising leaflet for the other Icemat products and a small set of instructions for the mounting of the microphone bracket. In all fairness, what else do you need?

The headphones themselves are pretty comfortable. The 'cans' (the part which sits around the ear) are soft and roomy. The inner head-brace is spring loaded and attached by two steel cables each side, and comfortably balanced the headphones on my head. Initially I was worried that these cables looked like they'd break but I had a good tug on them in the name of science and I'm convinced they are pretty strong. The whole headset looks quite bulky on my head, but I can't say that's a problem of any sort, it's just symptomatic of the design style. Maybe I just have a small head.

Specifications

(taken from the product packaging)

Headphones:

• Frequency Response: 18Hz - 28KHz
• Impedance: 40 Ohm
• SPL@1kHz, 1V rms: 99 - 104dB
• Cable length: 1.0m + 1.8m =2.8m.
• Jack: 3.5mm + 6.3mm converter.

Microphone:

• Frequency Response: 80Hz - 15KHz
• Pick-up pattern: Uni-directional
• Sensitivity (1V/Pa@1kHz): -38dB

Audio Output Quality

Using just the headphones on their own, without the extra cabling, I set about testing the audio quality. First up I tested a Chemical Brothers song called "Under the Influence" which contains some great sweeping bass, and as it's electronically produced has very clean sounds. My aging Videologic Sirocco Crossfire (4.1) speakers really like this song, producing some really meaty bass and a good dynamic output of sound. Of course, headphones are a very different beast to speakers. However, I was not disappointed. The high frequencies were reproduced clearly, and the bass was clear and present. Typically, as I would expect from any headphones, the bass does not have the room (or head) vibrating quality about it. After all that requires a very large speaker to move a lot of air, and that's just not going to happen with a set of headphones (and would you want them to?). That said, the bass was well reproduced, and didn't drown out the mid-range, which some bass rich headphones can. One thing I did notice was that despite the ear encompassing ear pieces, I could still hear external noise fairly well, but I'm thinking this is probably intended. This way you can hear the acoustics of your own voice and thus it will deter you from shouting into the microphone.

When used for gaming, these headphones also fair well. Again it's predominantly digital or artificially produced sound with a fair bit of speech so the sound clarity is usually pretty good. Unreal Tournament 2004 sounded just great, everything was perfectly clear and as the sound is so much closer to your ears you can even hear a few sounds you can't hear so well with speakers, like the spent ammo shells bouncing or the flak shards ricocheting off nearby objects. I also fired up Vietcong which has some great ambient jungle sounds like birds, insects and streams, as well as using 60's style guitar based music, and again I was not disappointed.

Microphone Input Quality

Now, obviously this is not just a set of headphones, but also a headset. So the next thing to test is the microphone. I was originally going to test this functionality just by setting up the headset with communications software like TeamSpeak and games like Unreal Tournament 2004, which has its own in-built communications system, but as I was happily fragging away in a game of onslaught in Unreal Tournament 2004, I realised all I was proving was that the headset works, which is obviously expected of it. So I sat down and tried to think of a more scientific approach. Thus I will compare the recorded audio profile of a standard PC desk microphone, a Plantronics headset, and the Icemat Audio Siberia's microphone both clipped to me and mounted on my monitor. This way I should be able to qualitatively prove which is most effective.

There is a margin of error in this test. I aim to produce the same speech in several different positions, and aiming to keep my level of speech as similar as I can, but I'm only human so there will be imperfections in this method. I also don't own a studio, so the background noise is also a possible issue, but I'll try to keep things as constant as possible.

Test Specifications

System:

• ABit NF7-S v1.2 (nForce2 with Soundstorm Audio)

Test Subjects (Microphones Only):

• Labtec NCAT AM-252 FlexNeck Deskboom Microphone
  • Frequency Response: 100-16kHz
  • Sensitivity: -47dB
• Plantronics .Audio 90 multimedia stereo PC headset
  • Frequency Response: 100-8kHz
  • Sensitivity: -39dB
• Icemat Audio Siberia
  • Frequency Response: 80Hz - 15KHz
  • Sensitivity: -38dB

Results

For the first 4 tests I kept the microphone settings fixed. As I am accustomed to using the Plantronics headset, that is what I used as a baseline. Each time I sat at my desk and performed the following 5 tests in turn:

• look left and say "left"
• look directly forward and say "front"
• look right and say "right"
• look up and say "up"
• look down and say "down"

My reason for doing this is that most people don't sit completely still when gaming. On the contrary, most people seem to think that by physically shifting about in their seat they might somehow help their game character avoid something. It of course doesn't work like that, but still, most of us are guilty of it whether we realise it or not.

After the first set of four tests I then re-calibrated the microphone setting for each of the other three microphones in turn (results 5-7) and re-ran the tests.

As you can see from the results the Labtec microphone (1) is struggling to pick anything up at all at these settings. The Icemat Siberia when clipped on me (2) is doing a pretty good job, probably due to the microphone's proximity to my mouth. When clipped onto my monitor (3) it doesn't do quite so well, but it's still doing a little better than the Labtec microphone which is roughly the same distance away. The Plantronics headset (4) is producing the best results, but it has the advantage of proximity, since the microphone boom is a few centimetres from my mouth. If you look carefully you can see the first sound on the Plantronics headset test is quite a bit larger and more violent looking than most of the others. Herein lies the disadvantage of its proximity - the "ffft" sound in "left" causes me to blow somewhat on the boom, which in turn causes a lot of distortion, which is undesirable.

The post-recalibration tests brought the volume levels of the recordings up to that of the Plantronics headset. Obviously, the further away the microphone and the less sensitive it is, the higher the recording volume needs to be. The downside here is that the microphone will start to pick up a lot of background noise. With the recalibrated Labtec results (5) a large increase in the input level was needed and you can see that the default '0' line between me speaking is a lot thicker than before. This made sound of the background hum moderately annoying. With the Icemat Siberia clipped to me (6), only a small adjustment of the microphone input level was needed and the pickup quality is generally very good. When the Icemat Siberia microphone is placed on the monitor (7), the extra distance required a little more microphone volume, but still produced acceptable results.

Conclusion

Using the Icemat Siberia has been nothing but a good experience on the whole. It's a well built and decent performing headset on the whole. The package contains everything you need for communications, be that specialist software like TeamSpeak, Ventrillo, SkyPe or in-game communications. The headphone produces a very respectable level of output quality and the microphone is sensitive and of a high quality. There are very few criticisms I can make to be honest. When I first received them I was not particularly fond of the whiteness (I'm one of those people who doesn't like the Apple look, at all) but while writing this review they released the black edition, so I'm happy now. I am slightly more fond of the headphone mounted microphone boom, as its more compact and frankly looks quite cool, but in some ways the Icemat Siberia's microphone solution offers a few more options for mounting at the expense of a single integrated cable, so it comes down to individual needs.

Thus I have decided to award the Icemat Siberia Headset the Silver Chainsaw for a very good product.

Enjoy! Please feel free to leave any comments.