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There is no doubt that the CM Storm Sonuz is extremely comfortable because I actually forgot I was wearing it. They are light, especially considering their size, and as such sit on the head without applying much pressure.
The ear cups on the Sonuz are large, and will encompass even the biggest ears as they have an internal diameter of 97mm. They certainly won't flatten or crush your ears like the ear pads from competing headsets.
CM Storm have used a pleasant cloth-like fabric with a very spongy filling for the ear cup. This allows them to mold around the head while still supporting the headset sufficiently. The other advantage of this material is it is breathable, allowing you to wear the headset for long periods of time without body temperature rising too much.
The headband is made of the same material as the ear cups but is slightly less padded than we were expecting. Unfortunately, this was the only place where we could feel a bit of pressure from the headset. A little tweaking with this part of the headset would resolve the minor problem – hopefully with the next revision.
To test the sound quality, we plugged it into a Creative X-Fi Elite Pro sound card. We then put the Sonuz headset through its paces in a variety of scenarios, including but not limited to; watching a blu-ray movie, playing PC games (Anno 2070, Formula 1 2011), listening to music from iTunes, and making a video call with Skype.
Firstly, while gaming, we must remember this headset is a straightforward stereo design. That said, the quality of sound produced was fantastic, and really ensured we enjoyed listening to music and playing games.
The headset delivers a good dynamic range of sounds, and speech is reproduced without sibilance or grain. Female vocals are also a strong point for this particular headset. The balance of audio frequencies between deep bass and high treble is well calibrated.
F1 car engine sounds are accurately reproduced and ambient noises could be heard in the mix, with the main foreground audio channels clearly highlighted.
We listened to the whole of Mahler's 9th Symphony, which has a glorious orchestration taking full advantage of its extra strength woodwind section (piccolo, 4 flutes, 4 oboes, Eb Clarinet, 3 Bb/A Clarinets, bass clarinet and 4 bassoons).
The sound staging with this headset is certainly impressive although specific recordings can give the impression of being ‘distant' – due to the wide soundstaging characteristics. There are also a few weak spots in the mid to high range frequencies which just sounded slightly flat and dull.
In terms of bass response, the Sonuz has a depth that we would only associate with a hefty subwoofer – clearly the 53 mm drivers are working well, but they can suffer from ‘booming' with some recordings. When watching The Matrix (Blu-Ray edition) we felt the overall experience was extremely positive, but the bass could do with a little more focus.
We recommend that your configuration has direct equaliser control to fine tune the frequencies to achieve the best reproduction.
While we didn't use the microphone during any gaming sessions, we did use it to make several Skype calls. Our verdict is certainly that the microphone is high quality, and our voice was easily picked up. A little bit more flexibility with microphone positioning would have been welcomed however.
Overall, the sound quality is excellent, especially at this price point … performing well in all tests.
