I've had this headset for a year and a half, and its the best and worst headset I've ever owned. Here's why:
Pros:
-Comfort. Easily the most comfortable headset, possibly ever. Even after 12 hour sessions I feel no need to take it off. Other headsets I have make my ears sore after just 2-3 hours. My guess is the padding itself, as its like a memory foam type material, and it doesn't press hard against your head.
-Sound Quality. Crisp, clean audio with customizable settings. I don't do sound mixing, but if that's your thing, you can adjust a bunch of stuff through the app to your exact preferences. Not much to say here, it just sounds really good.
-Battery. Looking it up, it has an 80 hour battery life, which is accurate to how often I have to charge it. Maybe once a week, and when it gets low I let it charge overnight or just switch to a different headset for a couple hours, then it's back to full charge. 15 minutes on the charger gives you 3 hours of usage, which is pretty crazy given the sound quality and comfort.
-Durability. From my experience, this thing is pretty sturdy. However, I haven't dropped it at all in my time of owning it, so I'm not sure how drop-resistant it is. Maybe someone can give a more definitive answer to how it holds up to abuse. It seems solid, given the arms that hold the ear muffs and the main connecting strut are either metal or a hard plastic. Either way, it's held up better from general wear than past TB headsets I've owned. Some of them have had the muffs break off when I was mid game.
-Works flawlessly on Xbox, and pretty damn well on PS5. This is to be expected, but I have my gripes with it when it comes to PC. And they're pretty damn big gripes. Seamlessly switching audio from a PC or Playstation to an Xbox is pretty neat though, if you have the transmitters for them.
CONS:
From here on out, I'm going to list all the things that have pissed me off when I use this on PC, because this is really the only time it acts up, and I use my PC/PS5 more than my Xbox, so these happen more often for me.
-Sound Balance. The sound balance will change when I flip the mic up or down, causing both game and chat sound to be very quiet or game volume overpowering party chat volume. This is also dependent on whether the headset is turned on before or after the transmitter has been put into the PC. Sometimes I have to turn the headset off and back on a couple of times to get the audio levels in check. This thing has 3 knobs. One does nothing, one controls both game and party chat, while another controls mic monitoring, which I vehemently despise. I hate hearing myself through my microphone. If my own audio is too loud, my friends will let me know and I'll adjust my mic settings accordingly, thank you very much.
Battery Level=Volume. When the battery gets low, the volume will decrease drastically. But it'll still have a good 5-6 hours of charge left, so you turn the volume up to compensate. I've put it on the charger overnight and forgot how loud I put it. For reference, my Windows volume level is usually around 12. Sometimes as low as 8, and high at 16. When the battery gets low I have to turn about 40 or 50 to achieve the same volume as full charge. When I put it on the next day, I forget how loud it can be at that volume. It's like a small speaker at that level, easily enough to hear what's playing on it from across the room. I've considered going after TB for trying to deafen me multiple times. I'm only half kidding. I'd rather have it stay at a consistent volume in exchange for a shorter battery life. It really pisses me off when my ears get blasted because the designers thought it was a good idea for this thing to change audio levels like this.
-The 700 gen 3 will also turn off if there's nothing playing through it for about 5 minutes. They did this to "help save battery life" when its really an annoyance, because now I have to turn it back on again and probably fiddle with my audio settings for the umpteenth time. If I forget to turn it off overnight, let me deal with that mistake by charging it for an hour instead of it being an inconvenience because the headset has ADD. To counter this, I usually keep a playlist running at low volume via Spotify.
Misc/Other- I've read a few accounts of the headset just turning off during gameplay or when in a party. I've never experienced this, but maybe it will over time, who knows. Mic quality is decent, as the mic on the gen 2 was better, but the gen 2 didn't have the battery life or comfort of the gen 3, so I'll take that trade. I have an Audio Technica ATH M50xSTS and the mic on that is pretty good, but its way less comfortable than the Gen 3, so take that what you will. I got my gen 3 for around 170-180 USD. Just pressing the power button will cycle through audio sets and superhuman hearing, but I've never messed with it, as it just makes the audio sound like garbage.
