Customer Ratings & Reviews

I've always had a great luck with JBL audio products, and this gaming headset is no exception. It delivers the goods with this headset, which has a great array of features. My only drawback was a bit of an issue with the USB cable and my gaming laptop, which I was thankfully able to work around. The headset is an over the ear design. It's made of a fairly sturdy plastic, with nicely padded cups and headband. Comfort was pretty good with extended wearing. While not noise canceling, they do a good job of isolating you from exterior sound. The headphones light up with the JBL logo on each side, which is customizable in software, but only when used via USB, not with the 3.5mm sound option. The left headphone contains a mic mute button, a game/chat audio balance dial, and a volume dial. On the bottom is the USB-C connection and 3.5mm audio cable. The analog 3.5mm cable is 1.2m long and the and USB-C to USB-A cable is 3m long. The USB cable is the one issue I ran into. When I plugged it into my gaming laptop, a Dell G3 17, the lights would come on, and the startup sound would be heard. And then it would promptly shutdown and fail to be detected. My only guess is that in some way, there was a power issue with the USB ports supplying enough power. I substituted in a Type-C to Type-C cable from my phone and used the G3's Type C Thunderbolt port. That worked, and I was able to install the software. Subsequently, however, the included cable--which is a very nice braided cable--worked fine. I did not have an issue on a gaming desktop, and there was no issue with the 3.5mm audio cable. The key feature of this headset is its support for spatial audio from a stereo headset. It does this via the use of the Quantum Engine software, which is only available on PC, and when connected via USB. It supports DTS but for me the real winner was JBL's QuantumSURROUND. The QuantumSURROUND is customizable--you put in your head size and physical dimensions for it to work best with you. I was impressed with it in both FPS games and with movies. The Quantum software has a large variety of customization options, and allows you set various custom configurations. Audio quality via this method was really good, and these serve well as both gaming headphones and for media consumption. While I expected the gaming to work well, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed movies with these as well. I fired up an older game, Bioshock Infinite, to see how it might benefit from audio enhancement. The firefight at the Hall of Heroes was epic through these. Now through the 3.5mm jack, or through USB with non-Windows devices, these act as more regular stereo headphones. Using a Type C to Type C cable (not included), I was able to listen fine with both a Pixel 2 XL and a Samsung Galaxy S20+. The 3.5mm cable worked fine with Xbox One. Mic quality was good. You have the option of either muting by lifting the mic, or using the mic mute button on the left headphone. The mic is not detachable. Overall, I found this to be a really compelling headset. It's probably my favorite that I've used. It's comfortable, sounds great, and is a good way to get into a spatial audio in a reasonable package. I really liked the Quantum audio software and especially the QuantumSURROUND mode it enables. My experience was only marred slightly by the installation issues that were particular to my model of gaming laptop, but the workaround wasn't hard. These are great for the PC gamer and good for eveything else.

First off, the Pros. These headsets produce great sound. The microphone picks up clearly and delivers my voice well. I really like the auto mute when you raise the mic which was great when I used it for a quick conference call. Its fantastic to know if you’re muted or not and to change it with a quick motion instead of trying to find a button on a video conferencing program. Overall it is a good headset. It worked flawlessly on my PS4 and I really liked it for this and wanted to like it overall, but the issues started once I tried to use it with other devices. Now for the cons. First, it doesn’t work with the switch through the usb-c. The manual and info says it does but from what I can tell it doesn’t. Now when the small print says it may not work with all models it makes you think that maybe it was just my version. Fortunately (or unfortunately depending on who’s view you take it from) there are a lot of Switches in my neighborhood so I was able to use mine (the newest model) a launch day original model and a lite. It doesn’t work with any of them. The audio works fine from the headphone jack, and to be honest the Switch doesn’t have the best audio output anyway so that is more than fine, I just don’t like being misled about the usb-c. Second, I’m not sure what exactly the root cause of the problem is, but the headsets are finicky and can be a royal pay in the rear to get working. I have tried this headset with 6 computers (2 laptops, 3 desktops and an all-in-one). These headsets worked on first time the way you would expect on only 2 of them. I eventually got them working with 5 of the computers but never could get it working on the last. There wasn’t even a consistent fix between the computers to identify what the cause of the issue was. But here’s a summary of the problem. These headsets allow you to better control the balance between your game and your online chatting with friends. It does this by setting up 3 different sound drivers /devices on your computer. One is the microphone, the second is the headset audio-chat and the third is the headset audio-game. What you are doing is manually setting your game to the game audio which utilizes all the fancy drivers to give you your 7.1 sound effects. Then you set your chat program to the audio-chat and now your audio all comes to your headset but through two settings. Then you have a dial that you can adjust the balance between chat and game to get the mix you want and instantly silence either one with a quick movement of your finger or thumb. From what I can tell, this feature is only active through USB so when you use the headset you’re just getting everything through the chat system and it just shuts off the system for audio-game and diverts that audio to your chat one and combines them. On all my computers that didn’t work the problem was the same, the chat and mic worked fine but the game audio just wouldn’t work. For one computer that didn’t work I had to delete the driver and reinstall and it fixed it. This computer the problem was so bad that if you tried to select the driver in your sound settings it would actually crash the computer. The second got fixed by disabling my antivirus (which I don’t want to keep that way permanently). The funny thing on this one was that if the antivirus was running and you tried to use it for audio it would cause all video files to come out funny and would actually prevent youtube from playing a video. The last one (and coincidentally the first computer i tried which motivated me to really test the headsets' compatibility) I couldn’t get to work right at all. This is probably a software/driver issue of some sort but the really need to fix this and I don't think I could recommend these until the company does fix it. If you happen to only have one computer as an option the headsets won't work for you, then you're just plain out of luck. Even if you could get it working with a few hours of troubleshooting, you’re still in for a world of frustration. When they work on a PC its awesome. But it loses stars for the hassle when it doesn’t work. You can always just use the headphone jack, but then you question why you’re paying more for features you can’t use on a headphone jack. It also loses a star for the Switch issue. They never said it would work with usb-c on my PS4 so I got what I expected, but I just don’t like it advertising a feature that doesn’t work and for getting my hopes up.

The JBL Quantum 400 has pretty good sound quality. The product works all right on the Xbox. The bass and the treble are present but aren’t very loud on the Xbox. The surround sound is okay and the position accuracy is fairly good, but the volume is not very loud. On the Xbox there were problems with the mic echoing at times. If you turn down the party chat volume the echo would go away, though it makes it harder to hear your team. When using the headset on the PC, the sound and experience were outstanding. The program that is compatible with the headset gives you some good customization options. The RGB on the headset has some customization, but it isn't very easy to choose the colors you would like. The sound options are fairly good and give you some good choices. You can listen in either surround sound or stereo. The surround sound really does improve the position accuracy for different types of games and you can really tell the difference. The microphone overall isn’t anything special. On the PC, the echo isn’t there now that you have a little more control over the volume of the headset. One of the few downsides is that the headset adapter is USB only instead of audio and mic connections. This is good for computers that don't have those ports, but it would be more convenient to have options for both. Overall the product works really great and gives you plenty of options as long as you use it on a PC. It is an okay headset if you are using it on an Xbox.

Was hoping for them to pair via Bluetooth but they are connection only, fair sound quality, but still overpriced. Was hoping to find something better at this price point.