Performance

The ROCCAT Kave headset was left burning-in for 100 hours to ensure that it was performing at its best for the actual tests. The tests were divided into two types, music and movies, and gaming. Overall the ROCCAT Kave behaves nicely, however, there is a high level of static coming from the USB control pod. This noise is easily audible in quiet sections while listening to music and quiet passages in games.

Music and Movies

Here the 5.1 surround sounds utterly horrible. Even with high quality source content the general sound qualities such as details and linearity are basically missing. The 5.1 implementation causes a distinct lack of everything except directionality.

The bass is alright, but not in anyway comparable to the bass performance of other $100 stereo headphones. The bass quantity is adjustable through the controller, but the bass extension is not that good. Midrange wise the ROCCAT Kave sounds like you are in a cave no matter how you configure the bias. And the oddities do not stop there. Due to the driver placement the sound stage with stereo content is just missing. Using different custom DSPs for Foobar2000 can get you back some of what is lost, but ultimately this headset will not do these things very well.

Even with 5.1 material such as movies the detail level proved surprisingly low and that mixed with the somewhat odd tonality makes it ill suited for both music listening and video watching.

Gaming

What the ROCCAT Kaves lack in terms of general sound quality they sort of make up for on the gaming front. With any decent sound card you will get a very good directional experience which could prove useful in FPS games such as BF3, CS:S and the likes. The detail level is below average which means that some spatial and positioning clues get washed out. This is a shame because the general 5.1 setup works good with the ROCCAT Kave. It can definitely be worthwhile to play around with the different settings both in-game and in your sound card's control panel, but again it will not fix the core deficits of the headset it will only highlight existing qualities.

As a headset with sole focus on gaming the ROCCAT Kave is perfectly fine. If you are an avid gamer looking for a headset that is reasonable bang for the buck, and gives you a good sense of directionality the Kaves are fine, but there are a lot of slightly more expensive stereo headphones out there which will be better for both gaming as well as music and movies. The imaging coherency is a bit odd with the ROCCAT Kaves and that takes some time to get used to. You always get the sense that it is very left / right or backwards forward. All the zones in the middle are almost indistinguishable. If you play around with the physical positioning of the headset and the sound controls you can sort some of it out.