Everglide s-500 Headset

Everglide is a gamer’s company, they seek to immerse themselves fully into the gaming experience. Offering mice, keyboards, mouse feet, pads and headsets Everglide has covered most of the bases and put themselves on inroads into the gaming enthusiast’s market. Today I’m taking a look at their gaming headset, the s-500. The s-500 isn’t a 5.1 headset, it doesn’t feature an outboard power supply nor USB connections. It’s not even blessed with an inline volume control but it does offer some very nice features that help to distinguish itself above the crowd.

First let’s see what Everglide has to say about the s-500’s shall we?

Ultra-light Membrane for Instantaneous Audio Response

The Everglide™ s-500 Professional Gaming Headphones feature an ultra-light membrane for instantaneous audio response. Faster than most conventional speaker drivers found in traditional headphones, the Everglide™ s-500 Professional Gaming Headphones are optimized for millisecond feedback to provide gaming response.

Optimal Noise Isolation

Recognizing that most professional gamers often compete in high volume noise environments, Everglide’s engineering team has designed the Everglide™ s-500 Professional Gaming Headphones for complete noise isolation without compromising on audio quality. The Everglide™ s-500 Professional Gaming Headphones have an oversized circumaural leather muff to reduce ambient noise. Making them one of the quietest noise-isolated circumaural headphones in the world

Enhanced Audio Positioning and Gaming Frequency Response

s-500 Professional Gaming Headphones The Everglide™ s-500 Professional Gaming Headphones deliver top notch audio positioning sound quality by accentuating key gaming sound frequencies. From weapon sounds to footsteps, Everglide™ s-500 Professional Gaming Headphones provide crystal clear audio positioning quality, allowing you to pinpoint with pixel perfect accuracy the position of team-mates and opponents on a map

Designed for Comfort and Extended Wear

The Everglide™ s-500 Professional Gaming Headphones have a unique circumaural earmuff design that provides an extremely comfortable fit. Designed to be used over an extended period of time, the Everglide™ s-500 Professional Gaming Headphones can be used for extended gaming marathons without subjecting you to headphone fatigue or discomfort.

The s-500 comes in a full color box that’s very eye catching. It’s done up in the company colors and shows very nice product shots along with much of the same information I’ve listed above.

The packaging shows a bit of wear for the trip here from Everglide’s facility. Does this mean anything negative for the end users? In a word yes. Everglide sells their product online themselves and these particular headphones are nearly impossible to find elsewhere so this shows that Everglide needs to make a bit of improvement in their shipping packaging. Happily there was no damage to the s-500 so the packaging was doing it’s job of keeping them safe. The packaging consisted of the box pictured and what you see pictured below.

Yep, that’s it. No molded foam, no peanuts, no bubble wrap. Just a bag with the headphones inside them and the mic in a zip baggie.

Inside the bag resides the s-500. They feature a full ten foot non-coiled cord with gold 3.5mm mini stereo connector (no adaptor for use with home stereo equipment, sadly) and oversized ear cups. The headband is thickly padded as are the ear pads and both are covered in a very supple leather. The mic is a clip-on lapel type condenser microphone with a six foot cord. This is nice since it’s not tied to being clipped onto the cord for the headphones. In fact it can be clipped to your shirt, collar or, if you game shirtless, the cord for the headphones.

The size adjustments for the ear cups are plastic but to my precision fingers it feels like the headband inside the leather-wrapped padding is a thin spring steel band. The tension on the headband, whatever it is comprised of, is pretty much on the money. There’s not too much pressure on your head making for very comfortable extended sessions of use. They stay put but don’t make you feel like your eyeballs are going to be blasted from their orbits after a few hours use.

The ear cups on the s-500’s are very well insulated. The level sound dampening is likely close to 10db. *Science content warning: reading the next few sentences could lead to an increase in knowledge and understanding of some technical matters.* Sound is measured in decibels (db) and to double the acoustic output as perceived by the human ear requires a gain of 10db of output. This in essence means that 70db is twice as loud as 60db, 80db is twice as loud as 70db and so on. This in turn means that by decreasing the sound reaching the ear by 10db you’ve just cut the perceived sound to one half of it’s original level. This benefits the wearer by reducing the volume level required to overcome ambient sound levels.

This aids in allowing you to hear the subtleties in the game such as footsteps behind you without requiring you to crank the volume to such a point that shotgun blasts and RPG explosions are deafening. This in turn helps to prevent fatigue from exposure to loud noises for extended periods of time.