ASUS Strix Fusion 500 Headset review - Product Overview

At the heart of the headphones are - naturally - the two 50mm neodymium magnet drivers that do all the heavy lifting here. Without wishing to give too much away, the unit is able to deliver very clean sound with almost no detectable distortion due to high volume, though I will be running it through my usual song showcase to try and weed out any whiff of this. The included microphone has the very neat feature of automatically detecting when it is returned to its vertical position, thereby disabling itself without the need to change anything in software or Windows itself. For this Asus, A+, good game. I love this feature. It's also very cleverly hidden, retracting into a recession built into the unit next to the left ear cup. This means it folds away and becomes totally invisible. Sound wise, the included microphone is (MIC QUALITY) As a final point re. the microphone, it is your fairly standard uni-directional boom unit. This does provide (in theory), some level of noise cancellation, as the unit should only pick up sound from a single direction, i.e. your mouth.

As previously mentioned, enabling Dolby 7.1 virtualisation is done using a small button located behind the left ear cup. When on, the only indication that Dolby is enabled is a single red LED next to said button. For me, this is good, as nothing should be taking away from the RGB lighting. Asus has to implement some way of letting the user easily know, and - to my mind - this is the best option. As for the rest of the controls, they are all implemented within the touchpad.

I will be honest, here. I initially deplored the idea of touch controls on this unit. I thought it was a gimmick, and really wasn't looking forward to - essentially - reaching up and continually touching my headset in a public place. This was mainly for fear for looking a bit strange. With that aside, I quickly grew to really like the touch controls. They become intuitive quickly, and worked without fail. I also realised that 2018 is a year of people in public talking into invisible microphones for hands free communication, talking to 'smart home' devices, stores you enter using a phone app, and much more. Of all the things on that short list, someone adjusting their headset by touching it suddenly looks pretty normal. In addition, the Sennheiser PXC 550 headset uses a similar 'on-cup' touch control scheme, so the idea is not entirely new. As a small aside, the unit is good for making small adjustments. If you want to drastically change the volume, you're better off just doing it through Windows.

Next, we move onto 2017's favourite craze. RGB lighting.