Let’s get right down to what these headphones are all about: gaming.  The s-500 are professional gaming headphones.  Of course, being professional is not always the best or even practical.  Let me explain.

There are a lot of products out there that use the ‘professional’ tag to sell the product.  It’s a way to brand a product so that the consumer will associate with quality.  You know, the idea that if a professional uses it to win and make money, then the product will really get my job done.

However.  Most products that are truly professional are incredibly useless for average tasks.  How about a car.  A professional car, an Indy car for example, would not be your first choice to get groceries.  Or how about shoes.  Professional shoes, say running shoes weighing less than an ounce, would certainly get you to work in the morning, but would look awfully funny next to the suit and briefcase.  Or conversely, some shiny leather tuxedo shoes just ain’t that great to run in.

I know, I hate to break it to ya.

Getting back to my point, the s-500 are possibly too professional.  At a LAN party or other social gaming event, you hear almost nothing other than what’s playing and suddenly become practically useless.  In a LAN party situation, the isolation of the s-500 will actually work against you, and you can’t hear your teammates talking to you.  This is especially bad when they are trying to tell you that the pizzas just arrived.  The lips move, but you can’t hear what they're saying.  I had to keep the s-500 slightly off the ear to be able to hear commands.  I have to break it to myself, I just ain’t a sealed headphone kinda gamer.

Enter problem number two: you can’t even hear yourself talk.  This level of isolation is good, but I found I had to enable monitoring on the microphone input just to hear myself over the din of Battlefield 2142.  Yup, I am painfully not a sealed headphone kind of gamer.

Then there is the microphone, which is a sperarate strap-on affair.  The mic is also of worthy quality, however you are now blessed with two cables leading from your head to your computer, one of which will eventually get eaten by the wheels of your chair.

If you are a competitive gamer, then the s-500 are a good choice, but true to spirit, you don’t get a lot of fluff.  The isolation is great for focus and to keep noise out, even from its own cable (which is a problem with most sealed headphones), but you don’t get an inline volume or mute.  The sound quality is good for sealed headphones, and certainly more than enough for gaming, but it isn’t quite at the level of comparably priced set of open back cans.

Maybe some time on the head with music will even things out?