Closer Examination

The most striking aspect of the Immersa, the one that's definitely going to grab your attention first, are its truly massive ear cups. They're both wide - we're talking 100-millimeters here - and ridiculously fat. Try putting two thumbs next to each other; that's the approximate width of the cushion on each ear cup. When I first saw them, an image of MrSpeakers' Alpha Dogs, a high-end modification of Fostex' T50RP audiophile hi-fi headphones, immediately came to mmô mind. That's a good thing too, because it speaks volumes about the feeling of luxury I had when I first began to examine the Immersa. And they're charging just $50 for these? How is that even possible?!


The ear cup exterior is perforated, which is usually an indication of an open-back design, something you don't normally find in a gaming headset. But as it turns out, the mesh is there for decorative purposes only since the ear cups are completely closed underneath. The orange ring surrounding the center of each ear cup, and the company's logo, are there for the very same reason - aesthetics.


The left ear cup contains the retractable microphone, which can be pulled out and pushed back with a single movement of a hand regardless of whether it was bent in a certain way - once you start pushing it back in, it uses the hole out of which it came to automatically straighten itself out and hide away from sight.


The microphone can freely be bent in all directions, which makes it easy to point directly towards the mouth. Its head is shaped cylindrically and doesn't have any clear markings that would point you to the side of the microphone you're supposed to talk into. Sure, one side of the microphone's head has a single hole and the other has three, but there's no way you'll feel that distinction under your fingers unless you're an expert braille reader. However, the microphone doesn't seem to be too fussed about its exact positioning - the polar pattern is obviously omnidirectional. That means you can simply pull it out and bend it towards your mouth without having to worry about its head's angle of rotation. Nice.


The cable comes out of the left ear cup. It's 2.1 meters long, braided, and terminates in a 3.5-mm TRRS connector. A couple extra centimeters in length are gained after connecting the supplied 3.5-mm TRRS connector to a dual 3.5-mm TRS splitter.


About 30 centimeters down the cable is a plastic module equipped with a microphone mute switch and a volume knob. Both get their jobs done, but I'm not too crazy about either. The mute switch offers fairly weak tactile feedback - I'd like to feel a more precise, satisfying "click", and the problem with the volume knob is in fact caused by the lack of a clothes clip. Since there's no clip, the whole module moves around as you shift your body, so you'll never be sure in which direction you'll have to rotate the volume knob in order to increase or lower the volume. I ended up rotating it slightly in one direction, just enough to figure out what's happening with the volume, to then adjust it to a desirable level. It's a bit of a hassle, but by no means a deal breaker.