[BaldredSC]

Hey there. I'm "the friend" who bought the X3. Unlike most of you folks, I was not looking for a way to keep from disturbing my family. My "man room" is well separated from all of the bedrooms, so that was not an issue for me. I bought them, based on Javelin's experience, to increase the quality of my gaming experience. And so far, these puppies deliver!

Turtle Beach did fail to ship my headphones in time for the weekend, but their customer support really handled it well. At my request they personally went back and yanked my package before FedEx could pick it up and changed my shipping to the free variety (if not in time for my weekend of Halo 3 with Javelin, then no point in paying extra!).

They arrived yesterday. As luck would have it, I happened to be off work yesterday so I played all day and all night. As soon as the headphones arrived, I signed off to hook them up and then signed back on again.

Setup was easy. There is a small IR transmitter (MUCH smaller than the X2 transmitter I've seen in pictures). It requires AC power and then has a 1/4" audio jack. The audio cable has passthrough RCA connectors on the other end. You plug those into your TV and plug the XBox audio feed into the receiving end of the jack. This gives you audio through both the headphones and the TV so you can switch back and forth. The only negative is that if you have limited depth space behind your TV, you might have trouble with the jacks sticking out about 2 inches. If so, you can just get a pair of 90-degree adapters and you're in business.

While the headset gets the game sounds from the IR transmitter, the chat works the same way as the XBox brand headset. It plugs into your controller. They made it look and feel like the standard one. The mute switch is in the same place and everything, which I appreciate (I get confused easily). So the wiring is no more cumbersome than the standard XBox headset.

I've used it for about 8 hours of gaming and have no complaints so far. I agree with Javelin that using headphones reveals a lot of audio detail from the game. I found it much easier to detect incoming enemies or grenades thrown in my direction, which gave me a competitive edge over my experience before getting these headphones.

I had heard of complaints that the X2 did not handle chat very well - that chat voices were broken up. I did experience some of that with the X3, but not so much that it bothered me. It only seemed to happen in the lobbies when there was a lot of meaningless chatter going on that I didn't need to hear anyway. The X3 packaging claims to have improved on the chat experience and not having ever tried the X2, I can't claim otherwise. All I can say is that given my 8 hours of use, I'm very happy with the product and will use it all the time - day or night - from now on.