Roccat Elo 7.1 Air – Design & Features
The Roccat Elo 7.1 Air straddles the line between premium and budget gaming headsets. You can see it in the headset’s materials and construction: The cups and rotating forks are made from a durable, dark gray plastic, brought together with a two-piece adjustable metal band. The studio-style self-adjusting top band has mesh-coated foam padding, but has leatherette on top. It’s well-constructed, but it also doesn’t look “nice,” either. It’s purely utilitarian. Weighing in at 12.38 ounces (.77 pounds), it feels surprisingly light on-head thanks to the top-band, which distributes the weight across the top of your head. As I’ve written in previous reviews, I’m not wild about the aesthetics of the self-adjusting top band – they often don't sit flush on my head, which looks weird. Having used quite a few of them recently, though, it’s hard to deny that they do a good job making a gaming headset feel more comfortable, especially over a long period of time.
The earcups are nice and roomy, giving plenty of space for the speakers’ 50mm Neodymium drivers to do their thing. The padding, leatherette-covered memory foam, is fairly firm, though not uncomfortably so. The backs of the cups both have fairly large RGB-enabled logos: On the left side, you have the Roccat snow leopard. On the right, you have the text logo. Both RGB elements are adjustable through Swarm, Roccat’s configuration software. The Elo 7.1 Air has a fair number of onboard controls, which are all loaded onto the back of the left earcup. From top to bottom, you have two volume rollers – first for PC volume, then for mic monitoring volume. Curiously, the mute button is a large oval and very easy to press, but the power button just below is small and inset, so it’s annoying to find and more annoying to use. In theory, I assume the hard-to-press design is meant to prevent unintentional shutoffs, but I think they went a little too far. Lastly, there’s a USB-C port for charging and facilitating firmware updates. The charging cable does not double as a wired audio connection. 
Connectivity is something of a curiosity on the 7.1 Air. It connects exclusively through a 2.4GHz wireless connection via a USB dongle, which delivers a stable, lag-free connection, all of which is perfectly normal. That said, I noticed that it takes a good 10 seconds or so to connect to the dongle when you turn it on, which doesn’t seem like a long time until you’re waiting for your game audio to kick in. The odd part, to me at least, is that the headset is effectively PC-exclusive. It doesn’t work with the PlayStation 5, and only provides simple stereo sound for a docked Nintendo Switch. That’s in line with the Elo 7.1 Air’s branding, but it seems odd to me: Many headsets with this kind of connection go the extra mile to enable as much cross-compatibility as possible. 
The other side of the wireless coin, battery life, is one of Elo 7.1 Air’s strongest features. According to Roccat, the headset should last for up to 24 hours on a single charge. In my testing, I’ve found the headset tends to last 2-3 days per charge with the RGBs on, which comes just short of that – closer to 20 hours. That’s still very good, though: Most wireless gear tends to drain significantly faster with RGB lighting turned on, so keeping this close to the projected output is impressive. Lastly, let’s take a look at the headset’s detachable unidirectional wired boom mic. The plastic-coated wire is longer than average, making it very adjustable. I found its ideal range to be a little finicky: You want to be especially careful to make sure that the mic is pointed at your face to make sure you’re coming in at full volume. 
Roccat Elo 7.1 Air – Software
The Elo 7.1 Air supports customization through Roccat’s Swarm configuration software. Though its look is a bit out of date, Swarm is a robust piece of software, allowing players to be very thorough when customizing the headset. Using Swarm, you can set the Elo 7.1 Air’s levels, either using genre-specific presets or tweaking the EQ manually and creating a custom profile.
Swarm also allows you to toggle and change many other features, like activating virtual 7.1 surround sound or Turtle Beach’s “Superhuman Hearing” feature, which makes gameplay-relevant sounds like footsteps stand out. There are also a number microphone-related settings, including software-based clarity-boosting and active noise cancelling. Lastly, Swarm also allows you to customize the headset’s RGB logos, including the color, pattern, brightness, and speed (if it’s a flashing or changing option). 
Roccat Elo 7.1 Air – Gaming
So here’s where the other shoe drops. The Elo 7.1 Air looks like a pretty good headset, but the sound doesn’t make as strong an impression. Whether you’re playing games, watching videos, or listening to music, the Elo 7.1 Air is gratuitously bass-heavy. Even when you actively lower the bass to compensate, there’s a thump to low tones that overpowers mids and highs. In theory, this should be good for loud, raucous action games, and it certainly amplifies the explosions of games like Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, but it’s only useful in those specific moments. The rest of the time, gameplay sounds come through muddied and a bit compressed. In other games, like Fall Guys, the audio comes in perfectly fine – the music isn't "crystal clear" but it gets the job done without any noticeable compression or EQ issues. It’s realistically in line with budget -to-mid-range headsets, including its console counterpart, the Turtle Beach Stealth 600 Gen 2 for the Xbox Series X or PS5. On PC, though, with more configuration options, the problems feel more pronounced.
Even if it doesn’t sound superb, the Elo 7.1 Air’s namesake virtual surround sound works quite well. Playing as a killer in Dead by Daylight, a game with a lot of nuanced positional audio, I was able to track the footsteps and breathing of my opponents accurately, even as other audio cues came up. It’s good enough that I would not recommend using Turtle Beach’s “Superman Hearing” competitive audio enhancement, which can make footsteps even easier to hear, but tends to mess with the audio mix and make games unpleasant to listen to. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=best-gaming-headsets&captions=true"]
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