Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

First, I want to address all the "build quality" complaints everyone in the 1-star section has. I don't see those issues. If you man-handle them, yeah, of course they're going to break at the point where they're the least reinforced. I've had the set for long enough that I would have broken them where the 'weak-spot' is, and they are just not going to break that easily. I call b.s. on those complaints. Just treat them gently in the first place and they're not going to snap like twigs. Second, is the comfort. The comfort level, for me, is quite high with these. They really are for long-term wear if you want them to be. My only complaint is the foam band that goes around the top of your head. It is a little stiffer than you might suspect, even though it's foam. I have to wear these ever-so-slightly further forward on my head than I usually do with any other pair because the foam presses down on a vein or something, but it's not a deal-breaker. I saw someone say they're excruciating... Come on, man. I've found a comfortable way to wear them. I think anyone could. The thing I like most is that the ear-pads actually go, literally, around your whole ear. They don't press down on your ears at all, and you won't have the long-term throbbing ear pain that you would get with on-ear style pads. The fact that the pads are washable is also a huge bonus. One final remark on the comfort is in relation to size. Make no mistake, these aren't the sort of headphones you can just wear around your neck when you need a break. They're a little too big and bulky for that. The ear-pieces will press into your neck and rest against your jaw. This headset is either on your head, or on your desk. Pick one. Not a big complaint, necessarily, but it's an observation. Thirdly, the sound quality. I found that, even though these are 'stereo', the sound quality from them is fantastic. I had a comparable pair of Skull Candy ear-buds that were very nearly as good as these, but I think these are slightly better in quality. I went back and played Crysis on a whim with these, and I was amazed at all the small details I missed out on with my speaker system. Unless you can really crank your speakers, you don't get to hear a lot of finer details sometimes. *sigh* The downsides of apartment life... respect for the neighbors... Anyway, the bass is full, the treble is good, the middles aren't drowned out by either, and the volume these headphones can achieve is staggering. You really don't need to have your PC volume up very high to hear things very clearly. The microphone is what I would call 'decent'. It's not going to give you a studio-quality sound over Teamspeak or Ventrilo or anything like that, even if the channel has high codec quality, but you will come across clearly more-so than a cheapo 13 dollar set from Walmart or something. Also, please make sure you tweak your volume control options to have mic-boost enabled. Without that, you might run into some issues that others were describing where you couldn't be heard. I'm also using an actual sound-card rather than built-in crap that comes with a standard motherboard. I knocked down one of the stars only because the microphone wasn't as big of a leap in quality over my last pair as I was hoping it would be, but it was nowhere near a downgrade, and I'm otherwise very happy with them so far. Having read a lot of the 1-star comments before buying this set, I can say that you really shouldn't listen to them too much. A lot of the complaints aren't well-founded and I think they're gross exaggerations.