Turtle Beach Stealth 600 Gen 2 MAX review
- 1 Turtle Beach Stealth 600 Gen 2 MAX Specs
- 1.1 Control
- 1.2 Design and Usage
- 1.3 Connect
- 1.4 Battery
- 1.5 Performance
Turtle Beach makes game headsets that work well and aren’t too expensive. For example, the company’s Recon line of USB headsets is easy to use and has good sound. In the wireless space, the Stealth line is where you want to look, and now it’s back with a small-looking update that brings some pretty important changes. The Turtle Beach Stealth 600 Gen 2 MAX has a long name, but it’s one of the first wireless game headsets on the market that works with both Xbox and PlayStation systems. The battery life has also been greatly improved.
Turtle Beach Stealth 600 Gen 2 MAX Specs
| Product type | Headset |
| Wearing style | Headband |
| LED indicators | YES |
| Plug and Play | YES |
| Charging source | USB |
| Connectivity technology | Wireless |
| Acoustic system | Closed |
| Microphone direction type | Onmi Directional |
| Cables included | USB Type-C |
| Headphone frequency | 20 – 20000 Hz |
PROS:
- Effortless Rechargeables
- Support for many operating systems
- Excellent microphone
- Fancy knobs and EQ settings are right on board.
CONS:
- Poor bass reproduction.
- Having superhuman hearing is a pain.
- There is no wired audio playback option.
Control
On the left headphone, there is a dial for headphone volume and a dial for mic monitoring/sidetone volume. This is not a mic gain dial; it is just for setting the sidetone. There is also a mode button that lets you switch between the headset’s four EQ presets—Signature Sound, Bass Boost, Bass+Treble Boost, and Vocal Boost—and a power button that you can press to turn on the Superhuman Hearing feature. The point of Superhuman Hearing is to give you a competitive edge, but most of the time, it just takes away the sound. The mic on the headset is the same as it was last time. Fliping it up, it goes into the front of the left ear and mutes.
Design and Usage
The Turtle Beach Stealth 600 Gen 2 MAX is much like the Stealth 600 Gen 2 MAX. If you don’t look at the red version of the later model, it can be hard to tell them apart. This portable game headset is just as easy to set up and use as its predecessor, even if you use it on a different platform. Like the last one, this one is made of plastic and has the same two-part hinge that tilts and turns to fit different head shapes and lay flat.
The Turtle Beach Stealth 600 Gen 2 MAX is easy to use because everything is done on the hardware side. The headset is compatible with Turtle Beach Audio Hub (Windows/macOS), but the companion app only gives you access to firmware updates, not extra features. Still, the headset and the USB dongle that comes with it have a lot of different features. Most of this is the same as with the Turtle Beach Stealth 600 Gen 2.
Connect
The 2.4GHz USB-A wireless dongle with the Turtle Beach Stealth 600 Gen 2 MAX is the only way to connect it to the game platform of your choice. Even though that isn’t new on its own, the dongle has a new switch on the side that lets you switch between Xbox and USB modes. This makes the headset work with PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and anything else that allows USB audio.
The headset has two different receivers built in. You can see this when you connect the dongle to your PC and flip the switch. When the Stealth 600 Gen 2 MAX is linked via USB, Windows knows what it is and lists it as such. When it’s linked using the Xbox setting, Windows sees it as an Xbox Controller. This happens when you connect an Xbox Wireless game headset to a PC using its USB dongle or the separate Xbox Wireless adapter that many headsets need.
Battery
Every few weeks, a company comes out with a new version of a game gear battery that lasts twice as long or longer than its predecessor. The Turtle Beach Stealth 600 Gen 2 MAX fits this group very well. The headset worked for 78 hours and 23 minutes during our tests while playing real music at 75dB(SPL). That’s more than 30 hours longer than what Turtle Beach says, and it’s almost four times as long as the Turtle Beach Stealth 600 Gen 2’s battery life.
Performance
Turtle Beach’s products generally have a number of bleeps and bloops that let you know what you just hit and how many times. It means you shouldn’t have to take off your headset and look at it, even though the buttons are close together.
But let’s talk about how the 600P sounds. It is where it shines. When the 600Ps are turned on, the familiar bangs, sirens, and footsteps of the GTA 5 loading screen come to life. Seriously, a game that came out 8 years ago sounds different and suddenly gets people’s attention. Even more surprising is that, unlike the last Stealth 600, this one doesn’t use virtual sound. There might be. Directional audio cues move from front to back with real clarity, but this stereo set has been made to have a much wider range than normal. To do this, the earcups have been changed into a “D” shape, and the 50mm drivers have been tuned to give you a bigger range of sound around your ears.
There are four EQ presets here, but they all keep the 600P’s most important features: razor-sharp highs and an epic bass response that works great for first-person games. It’s not an all-arounder that can be turned down for neutral EQ music pleasure, but we’ve had so much fun cranking these up and listening to how well they sound explosions and shattered car windows in Rockstar’s veteran open-world game that we don’t care.
