Think high-end audio, and you probably don't think Asus. Think "affordable gaming gear" and you just might. The two extremes meet — at least in theory — in Asus' HP-100U Dolby Headphone set.
Design
There's quite a lot of what we can only call "stuff" in the HP-100U's box. First of all, the headphones themselves, which are large but surprisingly light. This is primarily because despite their silver styling, they're resolutely plastic, and rather cheap light plastic at that. Drumming your fingers against them when they're on your ears reveals a whole lot of hollow space and reverberation.
The same cheap plastic styling applies to the HP-100U's included microphone which features a tripod base and small flexible arm. Both headphones and microphones connect via short cables to a much more solid aluminium base into which both headphones and microphone connect. It's also a volume dial, and once Asus' Xonar software is installed, a mute button as well. The base feels solid and is genuinely fun to just sit and spin back and forth, executive toy style. As long as you're not wearing the headphones at the time, that is — you'll quickly go deaf if you do wear them and spin otherwise. With standard 3.5mm inputs, you could also use the base to feed out to other speakers or headphones as you needed to.
Asus also supplies a driver CD with the HP-100U, although it was missing from our review sample. Drivers can be downloaded for the 100U, although you've got to go looking for the Xonar USB package, as the base itself contains Asus' Xonar USB audio card, and that's what you're actually driving. One nice aspect here is that PCs and Macs are both supported on Asus' driver site.
Features
The HP-100U headphones themselves feature 40mm speakers with absolutely no inline controls whatsoever. You could plug them into anything, but if you're going to pay AU$150 you're more likely to throw them into the Xonar U1 USB base station. One nice aspect here is that the Xonar unit acts as its own dedicated USB sound card, so even on systems such as netbooks that typically have poor sound options, you'll get a better audio experience, including Dolby Digital and Dolby Pro Logic IIx at the cost of a little processing power.
Performance
As the HP-100U supports both Mac and Windows platforms, we installed it on two test systems to see how far Asus' Mac support goes. The basic answer is ... not very far. The Mac client is very rudimentary, and lacks the dedicated audio profiles, graphic equaliser and other tweak settings open to Windows users. The headphones and U1 do work on Macs, but with nowhere near the flexibility offered to Windows users.
The cheaper plastic build of the headphones and microphone did present a minor audio problem to us. Specifically, the light microphone is very easy to knock over, a problem exacerbated by its short cable length. The headphones creak when moving them on your head for comfort, and the cheap light plastic amplifies this effect.
Our other concern with the HP-100U is related to volume. Specifically, volume in abundance. Even at very low volume levels, the HP-100U is Loud with a capital L. Getting above about 60 per cent stated volume level for music or movies we started to find the headphones uncomfortably loud, and at full whack we wondered about the long-term effects of loud volume on our overall hearing capabilities.
With the volume suitably restrained, the HP-100U worked very well, especially for in-game usage. Heading back to a classic title that has a lot of ambient sound, BioShock gave us the creeps once again with only the headphones on as side and rear noises were presented very well given that the HP-100U is, after all, only playing with two actual speakers. Microphone pick-up was good as long as we were pretty close to it, but with the tiny amount of cable on offer, you don't get much choice there.
If you need a new sound card and new headphones — and as long as you remember to keep the volume somewhat restrained — then the HP-100U offers decent value for money. Anyone after just good quality headphones on their own could do a little better for the asking price.
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