Creative launches "Silencing" gaming headsets

Fatal1ty and Sound Blaster branded

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30 September 2009 9:34 GMT / By Duncan Geere

Creative has unveiled a couple of headsets aimed at PC gamers who fancy amping up their sound a little. There's the Sound Blaster Arena Surround USB Gaming Headset, and the Fatal1ty Professional Series Gaming Headset MkII. Both have a new noise-supression technology built in called "Silencer".

Silencer operates on both the headphones and the microphone. Like other noise-cancelling techs, it uses two microphones - one to work out what you want to hear (your voice, in most cases) and one to work out what you don't (your mum yelling at you to do your homework). It'll then generate an inverse waveform of what you don't want to hear and overlay it on top of the sound - cancelling out the noise you don't want to hear.

Let's take the Sound Blaster Arena Surround USB Gaming Headset first. As the name suggests, it plugs in via USB and includes X-Fi audio tech - which purportedly makes things sound better - the aforementioned Silencer noise supression and VoiceFX - that lets you change the sound of your voice over internet comms, so you can sound like an alien, or an orc.

Then there's the Fatal1ty Professional Series Gaming Headset MkII. This is an upgrade of the original Fatal1ty headset, branded after the minor gaming celebrity and Quake III and Poker player. This one has dual gold-plated minijacks that connect it to your computer, and can pump out 20Hz - 20kHz of frequency response.

The Sound Blaster Arena Surround USB Gaming Headset will cost 100 euros (about £90 at the time of writing) and the Fatal1ty Professional Series Gaming Headset MkII costs 70 euros - about £64. It's not clear when they'll be showing up on virtual shelves, but we wouldn't imagine it'll be long.