TechRadar Verdict
The Turtle Beach Elite Pro 2 for PC, PS4, and PS5 is a plush experience with stellar low-end response, but the weak mic and awkward on cord control layout hold it back.
Pros
- +
Powerful bass
- +
ALL the cushioning
- +
Premium materials
Cons
- -
Weak mic
- -
Amp is feature-light
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Two-minute review
As you can tell by its superlative-hoovering title and equally bold $250/£200 price tag, Turtle Beach’s gen 2 Elite Pro isn’t messing about. It’s intended to provide competition to the very best headsets out there. And when you think of the very best out there, the likes of Astro’s A40, Steelseries’ Pro Wireless, and Sennheiser’s GSP 670 all spring to mind… except unlike all the aforementioned models, the Elite Pro 2 is wired.
It’s not a straight fight, then. Wired models are becoming increasingly rare at this price point, and although they still offer a response time and fidelity that wireless equivalents can’t quite match in pure numbers, the sheer quality of wireless cans in recent years has seen most of us ditch the cables. The Elite Pro 2 gives us a compelling reason to rethink, though.
First on that list is the comfort. As a journalist who’s often stayed in hotels booked on the company dime, I’m pretty sure I’ve slept on mattresses with less padding than these. It’s an absolutely phenomenal wedge of high quality, super-squishy memory foam surrounding each earcup, and just as with Razer’s foam earpads there’s a tiny recess for glasses frames which shows how much attention Turtle Beach’s designers are paying to comfort.
There’s a high degree of rotational movement to each earcup too, both at the headband and on a concertina-like joint at the driver. While all those axes of movement mean it’s not totally silent as it adjusts to your head movements, neither is it noticeably loud.
It’s comfortable. You get it. But the groundwork in ergonomics is matched when it comes to sound. This is always a matter of taste, of course, but to this reviewer’s ears the powerful thwomp delivered by an exaggerated low-end spike in the hardware EQ profile works brilliantly in-game.
No, they’re not a set of Beyerdynamic studio cans and they don’t give anything close to a flat response, but unless you were hoping to use the Elite Pro 2 with all your devices, and possibly mix Brian Eno’s next album with it, that’s not a problem.
As can sometimes happen with 50mm drivers and a large chamber around the ear formed by the earcup, there is some small compromise on clarity here, but you really have to A-B test with another headset to pick out the details that get lost in the Elite Pro 2’s storm of thunderous bass. TLDR: it makes guns sound glorious, less so delicate classical music recordings that have been painstakingly digitally restored from scratchy vinyl. The mic can’t match this powerful sound, though - as with other Turtle Beach models we’ve tested, it sounds thin and a little weak, although it’s clear enough for Discord chatter and playcalling without issues.
A word on the setup: this particular model is compatible with either PC, PS4 or PS5 via USB and SP/DIF connections, but there’s an Xbox and PC variant too for Team Green members. In either scenario, it’s not the cleanest setup in the world.
Breaking the signal chain along your cable is Turtle Beach’s impressively titled Superamp, which turns a 3.5mm audio jack connection into a USB input to your output device.
Without the use of an additional app, controls on the Superamp are limited to volume and.... Message ends. It’s a lovely volume dial, don’t get me wrong. It’s notched, and the lighting’s quite precise as it fills a bar to indicate your current level.
The mic mute, meanwhile, is controlled by an inline switch on the 3.5mm cable which feels like an odd layout. Most of the control is handled by a third method, though: Turtle Beach’s app. The app works fine and offers a few EQ presets in addition to chatmix and monitoring gain (the Superamp has a 3.5mm monitoring input), but this combination of control layouts feels like the Elite Pro 2’s component parts have been retrofitted to work together. It’s not very becoming of the model name.
The decision you face is whether you can put up with a couple of extra cables dangling around, yet another app on your smartphone home screen, and a Superamp to house… somewhere, in the name of great sound and comfort. There are certainly more elegant setups out there, but there’d be no buyer’s remorse from anyone who slips the Elite Pro 2 over their ears.
