Home > Consumer Reviews > Altec Lansing AHS-502 Studio Headset with Mic

I've now owned this headseat for over a year. I have Altec Lansing 5.1 PC speakers and thought this the AHS-502i would be the same quality, they are not. I frequently would swivel the mic boom away from my mouth/face and in alighment with the head cross piece, straight up in the air. After about 4 months, something must have gone wrong with the internal wiring, because it doesn't work and I can't adjust it to make it work. I continue to use the headset for just the headphones and now the "volume wheel" in the cable is going out. Music quality is good and the headphones have never had an issue and handle pretty strong and loud bass. Anyway, the wheel switch is full of static, cuts out and you spin it to get a good "stereo" connection. If I move or the cable changes position, the sound can cut out, it's touchy and sensitive. I am shopping now for a new headseat and will NOT replace this one with the same product.

I bought this for my husband who does alot of gaming on-line, where they use voice programs to communicate. But the sound quality for the headphones on this product was very muffled, and he ends up not using this becuse of the horrible sound quality. The mic portion of this product seems to work ok however.

[Strengths] 1. The Best Bass I have ever heard on any headphone, 2. Overall very good sound quality, 3. Decent styling for the price

[Weaknesses] 1. Poor wearing comfort for people with medium-large ears, 2. Limited headphone adjustment, dont fit well for people with large heads

Summary: I bought these for $17 + shipping and they seemed a good deal at that price especially since I was hoping that they would have the same 40mm neodymium drivers as the costlier ahs602i model, which has very good reviews.

And my guess about the above luckily turned out to be true as the sound quality is *awesome*. I have tried the headphone with rock, metal, japanese-percussion, techno, pop, western classical, vocal, jazz etc. genre's and they have performed excellent in each category. So if anyone tell you that these don't sound good, has probably ended up with a defective piece or is hard of hearing !

The microphone is good for using skype, gtalk, yahoo messenger like internet based voice chat software because these softwares automatically adjust the microphone volume to the required levels. However for normal voice recording you would have to turn on mic-boost which adds a hiss to the recording. Voice recording is terrible without turning the boost on... but somehow it works great for internet chat as all of my friends/family could hear me very well.

The only major problem i faced with these headphone is wearing comfort. The head pieces have a closed cup design and are good only for people with small ear's. As a result I can only wear these headphone for a maximum of 1 hour after which they become unbearable and my ear turn pink red. A few dimension to help you: my ears are 6.5cm tip to tip and the ear cups are 8.5cm dia with the inner hollow 4cm dia.

Next time i would be more careful about wear comfort.

Useful Tip: This headsets comes with a 1 yr mfg. warranty but on filling an online product registration it will be extended to 2 years (refer to the included registration card hidden in the packaging).

Had this set for about 4 months of daily pc gaming use. Only put them on and taken them off and laid on desk at night and microphone would work sporadically after the first 6 weeks due to the poor construction of the in-line volume controls. I would have to twist and fool with the wires to get it to work. AT times it was impossible until I tried the next day. I'm an electronics enginner so I took apart the in-line controls and checked the construction and the wires are microscopic that connect to a tiny I mean real tiny pc board. This is where they fray and lose contact. watch out for these because in time the solder contact where the mic is attached on this board will come off the board completely rendering them useless unless you want just headphones. Steer clear and look somewhere else.

I use Team Speak and this set works GREAT! mic is in a good place, team mates tell me i they can hear me much better now (is that a good thing?), head phones sound great! i would recomend these to ANYONE doing any kind of online gaming in use with any team chat software.
GREAT PURCHASE for under $20... retail website has these for $40