A , when it works well, can be quite liberating. No more running over the cord with your rolling desk chair, no more pulling off your headset when you go to the fridge to grab a drink, no more cats treating your headset cords as their latest toy. (Cat owners, you know what I'm talking about.) The headset is powered by an internal lithium ion battery for which Creative claims about 8 hours of battery life. In my experience, this is pretty accurate, perhaps even conservative. You recharge the headset with a simple mini-USB plug, and you can charge it while you use it.
The PC software is lean and mean, with simple controls for the various audio settings and an interface design that is obviously meant to mirror the World of Warcraft interface. It includes a page to adjust the earpiece illumination, another to alter the THX TrueStudio PC sound processing settings, one for tweaking EQ and voice morphing settings, and one for setting key bindings.
A fifth page lets you bind the "Voice Tap" peripheral to whatever key binding you wish. The Voice Tap is a separate accessory, a foot pedal that you step on as your push-to-talk key for voice communication or whatever else you wish to assign it to. (It was unavailable for testing at the time of this review.) If you really like to tweak things, you'll be glad to know that you can assign keyboard hotkeys to literally anything that is adjustable in this control panel, as well as save profiles for different games or users.
Of course, all the comfort and design in the world means nothing if the headset doesn't sound great. I'm happy to report that the World of Warcraft Wireless Headset does indeed deliver fantastic sound. I tested the headset with a slew of new games, from Dirt 2 to BioShock 2 to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2--plus, of course, plenty of World of Warcraft. The nice, large drivers easily deliver the kind of bass you want to hear when a Big Daddy is stomping around the room in BioShock 2. Midrange and high tones are clean and crisp, but nothing is especially overpowering. The sound curve is nice and flat, and almost never distorts. If I had to sum up the sound in one word, I'd say "balanced." These headphones are as good for listening to music as they are for games, especially if you're willing to tweak the EQ a bit.
The THX TrueStudio PC sound technologies incorporated into the software are a mix of useful and distracting. Fortunately, they're all optional, and you can adjust each in strength. The Crystalizer function is intended to increase the "definition" of the sound, making things sound crisper and to bring forward some lost high-frequency sound. I found that when cranked up to 100 percent, the changes were too dramatic, but ultimately everything sounded really good with this feature left enabled at around 30 percent strength. The bass enhancement does a good job of boosting bass without the drivers ever bottoming out (you know, that horrible "buzz" you get when a driver just can't go that low); but it destroys the nice flat response curve, and the drivers already deliver all the bass you need.