Introduction
Award-winning PC enthusiast’s mainstay Creative, a company that could always grab attention just with their name, has been around for a very long time. Anyone who knows them will know them as Creative Labs, and also acknowledge how they changed hum-drum Personal Computers into a PC with amazing sound capabilities in the mid-’90s. Creative Labs, or Creative as they are now known, have been around for longer than most current PC brands, with humble beginnings in the early eighties, when the likes of Apple, Atari and Intel were becoming household names.
Creative Labs products centred more around Sound Cards and brought a lot of sound capability to the average home, having a sound card, and making it a Creative Labs was a must. Fast forward a decade and everything was different. On-board sound was becoming a thing, and with companies like Realtek, there was a real force behind bringing on-board audio to the masses, something that Realtek succeeded to do at the correct price point, something that on-board graphics failed to achieve.
Creative Labs had some issues and needed to reinvent itself, even promising a processor which would give a 100-fold increase in super computing power over the current technology, as well as advances in consumer 3D graphics. This ended up being the ZMS-05 processor from ZiiLABS, but still, it grabbed the headlines. So where next for Creative Labs, well apart from the company movements and ultimately re-branding as Creative, peripherals were becoming a focus, namely external headphone amps and gaming headphones and headsets.
We are PC enthusiasts, and in this industry, you occasionally get to meet your heroes, albeit via a review sample. We are fans, but that doesn’t mean this is an automatic five stars, in fact, we are not even headphone people, and have been deliberately slow to get on the headset bandwagon. We game with speakers (Creative T40 Series 2) and even rarely venture into surround sound for gaming. We are really coming at this from cold.
| Sound BlasterX H6 | |
|---|---|
| Model Number | H6 |
| Audio Processing | BlasterX Acoustic Engine |
| Audio Drivers | 50mm FullSpectrum |
| Headset Frequency Response | 20Hz ~ 20kHz |
| Audio Technologies | Scout Mode |
| Microphone | Frequency Response: 50Hz ~ 15kHz Sensitivity: -42dB Microphone Type: ClearComms Unidirectional Condenser Detachable: Yes Impedance: <2.2k ohms |
| Interface | USB, 3.5mm Stereo Input |
| Supported OS | Windows 7, 8, Vista, 8.1, Mac OS X v10.8 and above, Windows 10 |
| Supported Consoles | Xbox One via 3.5mm 4-pole audio cable (With Xbox One Stereo Headset Adapter) PlayStation 4 via USB, Nintendo Switch (no voice comms) via USB (Dock) and 3.5mm 4-pole audio cable (Console) USB connection |
| Warranty | 2-year Limited Hardware Warranty |
These days, it’s all a bit obvious, and gaming headsets are everywhere, so should we be interested in Creative Labs anymore? Creative got in touch and asked if we wanted to review a one of their Sound BlasterX H6 7.1 USB Gaming Headsets, and we said absolutely!