Short story: Mic does not work with Auzentech X-fi Prelude but does work with Dell Optiplex onboard audio.

long story: It's the bias voltage and the gain. The bias voltage on the Prelude isn't enough to make the red LED switch on. You can hear the mic, but only if you crank the volume up all the way and start shouting while you stick the mic down your throat.

The onboard audio from Dell has enough juice to make the LED happy and it has a mic gain boost switch that makes the mic clearly audible without having to shove it in your face. There's a lot of background noise, but despite the name of the product this isn't professional gear and the results are as good as I hoped.

I once had a Santa Cruz and a Telex H-51 heaset. The Santa Cruz had a mic gain boost switch too that was similarly necessary. H-51 didn't have a red LED though.

Anyway I was wondering what experience other people have had with this headset. I am wondering if any Creative card works well with this headset.

havnt used that headset up intresting to hear about the voltage prob havnt seen that before.

As for creative i have an audigy 2 ZS and have used many a headset with it and had no problems, but thenn agian non have had LEDs on them.

Not used it myself, but I think it's all hype personally

I found the gain boost - it is the plus sign right above the mic mixer in the control panel. I think it's an intrinsic Windows feature. Now the mic volume is adequate with the mic mixer jacked up all the way. There's still no excuse for inadequate bias juice. It may be too low a voltage or it may be an inadeqate current spec - which would cause the voltage to drop.

The headset isn't just hype. The ear cushions are excellent, the headband is great. The earcups swivel and pivot on the headband. I have much better sounding/more expensive headphones that don't do that (the earcups only swivel, they don't pivot).

Sennheiser makes a multimedia headset with a comparable street price that has earcups that are completely fixed with respect to the headband.

I do see that Sennheiser now has a model that is comparable to the Fatal1ty pro in physical construction (except it doesn't have a flexi mic arm) - for twice as much money. Upon reflection - it will take a lot of gain to make the mic audible if the arm can't be flexed inwards. That means a lot of noise, not necessarily background noise but snap, crackle, pop line noise (or sweeps, bleeps, and creeps if you prefer). When you look at the professional Sennheiser headsets (will most definitely not work with PC soundcard) they clearly come with the same sort of flexible boom that the Fatal1ty Pro has. This isn't the cheap, plastic flexible arm that's on my AT&T telephone headset, it's telescoping parts underneath the plastic skin.
I wish Sennheiser would come out with the unequivocally best gaming headset; with the amount they are charging anything less is unacceptable.

The sound quality of these headphones is so-so. Still enjoyable. But that's a big improvement over the Telex H-51, which cost half as much.

Good to know, I have not used them, I just see some of the Fatal1ty hardware as hype due to the cost/features of the X-Fi card. XRAM is neat, but very few games will ever use it for the money one pays.

Still using my SteelSound headset here, and going strong.

When I inspected prices the XRAM models only cost $10 more than the equivalent non-XRAM models.

You will get better virtualized 3D audio using analog connections to an X-fi than using Steelsound's USB adapter. How exactly does the seperate microphone attach to the headset?

You lost me there. I only use the headset, not the USB soundcard, and the headset has a built in mic.

Do you have the model with the pull-out microphone? How flexible is it? And how good at staying in whatever position you put it in?

I did a really huge froogle search for all the best gaming headsets I could find and I never found Steelseries. I mean I never found them before you mentioned them.

BTW, the Fatal1ty Pro is selling for $70 on Creative's own site right now.

Finally found the headset i will prob be looking at next, just had the news about it come out:

news.moneycentral.msn....id=8276321

Hopefully the reviews of this should be good!