Roccat Syn Air Pro wireless gaming headset review

Roccat is one of the few companies out there you can generally rely on to produce good, reliable gear. Whether it's keyboards or gaming mice, Roccat's strength has always been its consistency. Roccat doesn't do flashy, but it gets the job done. That's why we had high hopes for Roccat's stylish Syn Air Pro wireless gaming headset.  

Shockingly, the Roccat Syn Air Pro ended up being a rare swing and miss. It just goes to show that a gaming headset needs to do more than sound good; it also has to be easy to use. 

The Syn Pro Air's biggest problem is the bundled  Neon Software. Instead of using Roccat Swarm, its usual suite for handling the myriad of settings, the Syn Pro Air uses its own thing. Here is where you'll change settings, adjust your EQs and goof around with the headset's RGB lighting. When I first received the headset, I had problems with the software not even recognizing the headset at first. It was only until a recent software update remedied that . 

The depth of options at your disposal in Neon is disappointing; you can't set user profiles, and the RGB settings are pretty limited. This wouldn't have bothered me too much, except that I kept running into a nagging issue where the headset would randomly disconnect itself from the PC and force me to turn off/on the headset to get it working again. Another annoyance was the series of loud, inexplicable beeps that I still can't determine what they signify. 

Frustratingly, the Roccat Syn Air Pro does sound great. I'm not a headset surround sound convert but turning on Superhuman Hearing, Turtle Beach's virtual surround sound tech, might make me a believer. I jumped back into the current season of Apex Legends and found the text to be useful when trying to hide from teams lead by Seer, the newest character whose abilities can see you through walls. I had mixed results, but that was mostly from a lack of skill on my part.

The headset is well balanced for music and movies. I finally got around to rewatching The Dark Knight, a film whose score famously can drown out any dialogue, and was able to make out most of Batman's grumbling even with a growing orchestra behind him. Another positive is that the detachable microphone is pretty good. I was able to be heard clearly during Discord calls and matches of Apex Legends.

I was not expecting to like the honeycomb style RGB lighting Roccat has adopted for a lot of their hardware as much as I do. It's a low-key but striking design, and I prefer that over RGB accents along the rim of the ear cups. My only genuine complaint about the look of the Syn Air Pro is that the matte finish tends to cover the headset in smudges.  

Roccat claims you get about 24 hours of game time on the headset and it pretty much lines up with the headset I reviewed. Though, I would have loved to have seen a setting where the headset turns off a certain amount of time when not in use to help conserve battery life. That being said, make sure you turn off the headset when you're not using it. 

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The Syn Pro Air also is a bit of a tight fit, so if you wear glasses or have a large head (or both like yours truly), you may feel a bit of pressure when gaming for more than an hour. I would prefer an adjustable headband instead akin to what SteelSeries does with its Arctis headsets instead of moving ear cups up and down. 

The Roccat Syn Pro Air is a good-sounding wireless headset that is just too frustrating to use. Most of the features are locked behind unpredictable software and there are simply too many connectivity issues. It's hard to recommend a $150 headset when it feels like you're constantly at odds with it. I'm hoping that Roccat can improve the Neon over time with updates, but until then, I'd wait on this one.