The Turtle Beach Elite Atlas Aero is extremely well built. It retains its plastic chassis for the earcups from the older Atlas model, and also has a metal band which spans between them. Just inside that metal band is a soft cushion, to save your crown from fatigue.
The whole headset looks and feels very premium, and feature an opened back design, to give you more spacial awareness when inside an FPS like the new Modern Warfare.
The earcups themselves are huge, keeping inside two 50mm Nanoclear speakers. They’re a soft fabric, rather than leather to keep the likes of ear sweat down and air curclulating in long gaming sessions. They also offer a degree of noise isolation from the outside world, but you’ll still notice smaller sounds like typing on my keyboard, like I’m doing now. As a glasses wearer, I can safely say that I had no trouble using these headphones, as the foam is soft enough to create a groove for my glasses arms. I think the Turtle Beach Elite Atlas Aero is the comfiest set of headphones I’ve worn in a very long time, and the break-in period was really non-existant because they felt great straight from the box.
The left earcup is where all the action happens, and I must say, it’s a pretty busy user interface. From top to bottom: you’ve got two scroll wheels, one for volume and the other for variable mic monitoring. Trust me, you’ll mistakenly scroll one thinking it’s the other, many times. Underneath that you’ve got a hotkey, which by default activates the Superhuman Hearing function that increases the treble in your audio, which makes listening out for footsteps in games a lot easier, and lastly you have the power button, which turns the headphones on and off. There is a microUSB input present to charge the headphones when they’re dead. On the face of the earcup you’ve got a mute microphone button. All in all a very crowded space which is a tad frustrating, seeing as the other earcup has zero buttons.
Where the Turtle Beach Elite Atlas Aero shines is in its PC gaming performance. Sure, you can use these wireless with a PS4 or docked Nintendo Switch, or wired with an Xbox One controller, but if you decide to use them with a PC, you have access to the Turtle Beach Control Studio.
There’s a few games that I’ve currently got on rotation, being Call of Duty Modern Warfare, Heroes of the Storm, Gears 5 and The Outer Worlds, and I must say, audio performance inside all of them was absolutely fantastic! I could not fault the performance of these headphones what-so-ever. Of course with the likes of Modern Warfare, I relied on the Superhuman Hearing mode with Footsteps boost active, while the other games I stuck to stereo sound. I also left it on the Turtle Beach Sigature Sound profile which worked well for my needs.
The Turtle Beach Control Studio is a pretty hefty piece of software. It will change everything from producing 3D sound, balancing you in-game audio and chat, setting up your own equilisers, and more. Options are very in-depth, and for audiophiles out there, this will be a dream, to be able to set up various different profiles for different games and what not. But for casual gamers, I would have liked to have seen some more user presets added to the software. Something like Ali-A’s Fortnite profile, or Dr. Disrespect’s Black Ops 4 profile. Even if they’re not actually created by the pros. Just something that’ll save me time from finicking around with all these settings.
The microphone quality as expected is a little hazy and distorted if you’re coming from a condenser mic setup like I am with my Blue Yeti. However, it was extremely usable and I actually had no complaints from my friends when I used it while speaking to them in Discord. Even when I used these headphones on my PS4, I had no issue in party chat either.
Overall, I’m hugely impressed with the Turtle Beach Elite Atlas Aero gaming headset. It’s hugely comfortable, sounds amazing inside of games and best of all, comes with a huge array of customisable options. I wish they’d had some more presets to choose from, but I suppose half the fun is setting up this headset in your own unique way right? And I think they missed a trick not spreading out their buttons a little more to the other earcup. For more information, head over to the Turtle Beach headset.
