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If someone in your home likes to play on the Xbox 360, chances are you’re used to the constant noise of a virtual war filling your environment. I used to have that problem. My 15 year-old-son loves playing war-based games, and there were times when our house sounded like a Marine training camp. As my son dove deeper into his games, the volume would get increasingly louder until, at last, I had to rescue my sanity and so something about the noise.

“Doing something about the noise,” was an engineering problem that was more difficult to solve than I originally expected. Here’s the problem: If you want to play online, then you’ll need to use the Xbox 360 headset-microphone combination so you can talk to and listen to your online gaming buddies. But the headset-microphone combination, which attaches to the hand-held game controller, only handles communication with other gamers; it does not play the game’s sound effects. In effect, your ears have to listen to both the headset-microphone combination for communication as well as the external speakers for the game sound effects. This does nothing to solve the problem of filling the house with gaming noise. In fact, because the headset partially occludes one ear, you tend to turn up the speaker volume, which exacerbates the noise problem for everybody else in the house.

One potential answer is to mix the communication from your online gaming buddies with the game’s sound. The Xbox allows you to do this, so you get both the gaming sound and your screaming buddies through the external speakers. Very often, the “screaming buddies” use language unsuitable for this blog.

So you could take it one step further and mix the audio as before, but use a set of stereo headphones instead of external speakers. This makes the rest of the house a lot more livable, but still, there’s the problem of the microphone; that is, you still need to keep the communication headset close to your mouth so your online buddies can hear you talking. This weird combination thus forces you to wear two headsets; one to be placed over the ears, the other hanging around the neck and balanced delicately so the microphone is somewhere reasonably close to your mouth. Needless to say, this is a very inconvenient solution, and the combination of wires usually ends up in a tangled mess.

Well I’m happy to report that this problem has been solved quite well. A company by the name of Turtle Beach has found a lot of success marketing a wide variety of accessories for gaming, one of which directly solves the Xbox 360 headset nightmare. It's called the "Ear Force X4."

Here’s how it works:

You wear a very high quality (surround sound) set of headphones that are very comfortable. The headphones have an adjustable microphone that extends to your mouth. To get the gaming sounds, the headset maintains a wireless infrared connection with a base station that is located near the Xbox. The base station, in turn, takes the game-playing sound directly from the Xbox’s fiber-optic connector. (The fiber-optic receptacle is actually built into the video connector.) Thus, this brings the game-playing sounds directly to your ears without disturbing others in the house. To communicate with other online players, the headset has a wired connection that leads to the game controller. You can separately adjust the volume of the online players, mixing it with the game sound-effects to your liking. The microphone follows the same path through the wire to the game controller. There are no wires to get tangled, and the whole system provides a quality of sound that beats most room speakers.

The bottom line is that my son can now play his games online and communicate with all his gaming buddies, and the only noise I hear is his side of the conversation, which is no more disturbing than listening to someone talk on the phone.

My son has been using this system for nearly a year, and we’ve not had any problems. We use rechargeable batteries, so the environmental impact is minimized.

And I can finally have some peace and quiet in the house.

Happy Gaming!

Dan

Xbox Live gamer tag: CombatDan

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