E3: Hands-on with the new Astro A50s

Astro headsets are already among the best in the gaming world. The A40s and its wireless brother, the A50s, are amazing, and this year at E3, we were able to sit down and have a demo with the brand new A50s. While the build quality and audio fidelity is rather unchanged, there are some very cool new features coming to the product line that are very noteworthy.

The first new feature is that they are going to have mod kits, much like we saw in the A40 TR edition. The mic and tags cannot be removed, so the mod kit will include only the leather ear cushions and head strap padding. Astro has taken the same technology that was in the Mixamp Pro for the A40 TR, and placed it in a brand new charge station dock. The dock is very slick looking and features easy-to-read light indicators. The Dolby toggle is on the back of the right ear cup, which will save you quite a bit of walking if you want to switch back and forth between music and gaming.

My favorite feature so far was the addition of the accelorometer. This enables the headphones to recognize when they’ve been set down and static for a specific period of time, so that they can shut themselves off and save you that precious battery life. A big bonus for Xbox fans is that, for the first time, the headphone mic is completely wireless. You will not have to run a cable from the controller to the headphones! The last big upgrade we saw was that the new A50s will be running wirelessly on 5Ghz.

Overall, it was a great showing from Astro, and we will hopefully get our hands on a pair of these for a full blown review in the future. Expect to see these on the market later this summer, retailing at $300.