Introduction

Australian development studio Cyber Sport Pty. Ltd. recently purchased Flexiglow Hong Kong and its high-performance gaming accessory subsidiary Cyber Snipa. Cyber Snipa produces mice, keyboards, headsets, and webcams for gamers. The focus of this review is the Cyber Snipa Sonar 5.1 USB headset, a comfortable surround sound, bus-powered headset with a nine foot (!) cable and a fully-positionable microphone. BIOS LEVEL feels the beats and thumps in this review.

Features & Specifications

Packaging

The Cyber Snipa Sonar 5.1 headset arrives in a decently-decorated box which shows the item and its in-line control module. It also shows prominently that it does 5.1 surround sound and connects via USB.

The rear of the packaging shows an artistic exploded view of the headset. There are actually three speakers in each earpiece: one each for the front, rear, and sub-woofer channels. It also shows the a screen shot of the configuration software.

Included in the package is the headset itself, a driver disc and a manual.

First Look

The Cyber Snipa Sonar 5.1 headset has a black and red motif to its plastic and velour exteriors. The ear cups pads are made of velour and the top band has a mesh piece for increased airflow. The microphone is very, very bendable and can be positioned just about any way the user pleases. Its base rotates, too.

The control module has two LEDs, three buttons, and a switch. The LEDs show power to the device and the microphone. The buttons control system volume and mute. The switch controls the microphone power.

The ear cups are very, very positionable, too. They not only turn to the side so they could be used as speakers, but they also fold in for storage. This is a great boon for LAN party-goers who have a limited amount of space in their bags.

Windows Installation and Use

Upon connecting it, the headset was recognized and immediately usable in Windows XP Professional 64-bit, the choice version of Windows for BIOS LEVEL. The volume could not be changed, however, and and the power button on the control module blinked incessantly.

However, to get the full potential configurable options, one must install the official drivers. This process was painless and required only a single reboot. The driver is not signed by WHQL.

The control software is pretty neat, but I think that most users won't ever need to change the settings. The defaults are pretty solid.

There are two demo applications included, too. These demos show off the 3D sound engine in the driver.

For some playtesting, I played Call of Duty 4, Team Fortress 2, and Crysis. I compared the Sonar 5.1 to my existing hardware, a Creative X-Fi Gamer with a Plantronics .Audio 770 headset connected via front audio jacks. For the Call of Duty 4 test, I used the Sonar with and without the packaged drivers, while I used only the packaged drivers for the others.

The sound was excellent. I had my volume at approximately 10% because this headset can really pump out the sound. Crysis sounded ten times better than with my stereo headset, as did CoD4 and TF2.

Music and movies were better-sounding, too. I simply used Windows Media Player for this test.

However, one thing which enthusiasts often forget is the amount of CPU time which an audio device uses. Traditional sound cards, such as a Creative Sound Blaster or ASUS Xonar, offload most of the audio processing onto a dedicated DSP, relieving the CPU of that duty. On-board sound cards rely on the CPU to handle these tasks. When the audio duties must be handled by the CPU, frame rates drop. That's why enthusiasts desire dedicated audio hardware.

To test CPU usage and frame rates, I used Unreal Tournament 3 in conjunction with ut3bench. The settings were as follows: level = WAR-Floodgate_bot, bots = 12, time = 60, res = 1680x1050, sound, texture = 1, level = 1.

Repeated trials put the X-Fi Gamer between 50 and 60 fps and the Sonar 5.1 consistently between 43 and 50. A ten frames per second difference isn't quite noticeable at these higher frame rates, but I did notice serious, visible difference while playing Crysis.

Now remember, cautious reader, that my comparison is a little extreme. The X-Fi Gamer is a $100 PCI sound card and the Sonar 5.1 is a $50 headset with a USB audio chipset. The Sonar 5.1 will be an improvement if a user was previously bound to an motherboard-integrated audio chipset.