LucidSound LS50X wireless gaming headset review: A costly contender
DexertoThe Lucidsound LS50X promises a premium audio and gaming experience while coming into an incredibly competitive price point in the gaming headset market.
The LucidSound LS50X gaming headset comes into an incredibly saturated gaming headset market, with tech brands all vying for a piece of the pie. Offering a powerful 50mm driver and dual-wireless functionality, the specs all look good, but is it actually any good?
We’ve extensively tested the LucidSound Ls50X inside and out. The headset comes into the same territory as some of the best gaming headsets of 2022 and comes with a steep $250 price to match. So, does it cut the mustard when it comes to using it all day long, and will it stand up to its competitors?
Key Specs
- Connectivity: Bluetooth 4.2, USB-A dongle (2.4Ghz wireless)
- Driver diameter: 50mm
- Frequency response: 20Hz – 20kHz
- Weight: 408g
- Compatibility: Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Windows 10
- Features: Simultaneous Bluetooth and 2.4Ghz operation, dual microphones, inline audio mixing, 20-hour battery life, memory foam earcups with cooling gel, 3.5mm jack
- Price: $249.99 / £239.99
Included in the box: LucidSound LS50x gaming headset, removable boom mic, USB-A wireless transmitter, 3.5mm cable, travel case, mic port cover
Design
Immediately after opening the box, you’re immediately greeted with a premium package. Unzip the included carrying case and you’ll be greeted with the high-quality metal frame that sinks towards the earcup housing, which is covered in protein leather, with a quilted headband to match. It makes for an incredibly premium-looking headset, which is welcome in a segment full of gaming headsets riddled with RGB.
The plastic earcups are covered in memory foam, and a plush cooling gel, with the LucidSound logo displayed on each earcup. Our only qualm with this is that we don’t particularly like the logo embellished on the side, and a quieter look would have worked just as well.
The left earcup houses the wireless controls, USB-C charging port, power button, and a slot for the removable boom mic. There’s an included blank to cover the hole where the mic should be when not in use. We don’t particularly love the look of the detachable microphone, which looks to be at odds with the rest of the headset’s premium look and feel.
Competitors like Steelseries and Turtle Beach both offer a cleaner solution when it comes to microphones, and at this price point, we would expect a slightly smoother integration.
The dial on the left earcup can also control volume, and a tap will also play or pause your music. While the right earcup’s dial can mix the multiple audio sources that you may have coming through, in addition to a Bluetooth pairing button.
There aren’t many gaming headsets on the market that look as good as this, but it comes at the price of comfort. The metal construction makes the headset very heavy, combined with the clamping force also afforded by the metal construction, it quickly became uncomfortable to wear for longer periods of time.
You can eventually get used to this, but it became a little too much to keep on our heads for longer than a few hours at a time. The premium metal construction also comes at odds with the plastic dials on the side of each earcup, which really didn’t feel high-quality when in use. The ticking of the dial sounds more like a grind, and we would have preferred something a little bit smoother.
Sound quality
Dexerto The 50mm drivers of the LucidSound LS50X make it an incredibly formidable gaming headset, with a deep and bassy soundstage. Unfortunately, this seems to make the mids and highs lose a little bit of sparkle. We would have liked it to be slightly more natural.
But, in most cases, these headphones sound absolutely excellent. We torture-tested it with Final Fantasy XIV, where many sounds can play at once while up to 24 players fight together in a raid. On lower-end headsets, this ends up sounding like mud, but the LucidSound LS50X handled it admirably.
When playing a shooter like Halo: Infinite, the headset manages to define every high frequency incredibly well, meaning that you’re able to hear enemies coming towards you, or even rustling noises coming from a bush.
For music, we tested it against Nails’ “You will never be one of us”, a track full of blast-beasts and distorted guitars. On many lesser headsets, this track will end up sounding just like white noise. The LS50X attempted to handle this as best as it could, with a slightly hollow low frequency, this took a little bit of life out of the drums.
There’s a slight loss of detail in the mids, but it’s far from sounding anywhere near bad. For almost every game, this headset will outperform many gaming headsets, as you’d hope for the eye-watering price. The headset also supports surround sound, which works as you’d expect in titles that support it, and it’s all integrated by the Xbox without a single hitch.
Microphone quality
The LucidSound LS50X’s detachable boom mic isn’t actually the only microphone the headset comes with. There’s also a microphone on the headset itself, making it slightly more flexible if you were to take it out and about. There’s also additional background noise and echo cancellation built into the mic, which sounds great on paper. The reality of this is that the microphone can end up sounding slightly quiet or muffled when in use if you have a lot going on around you.
If you’re in a quieter room, then this feature won’t kick in and you should have crystal-clear audio. This is slightly disappointing, as the tech sounded pretty neat on paper, but unless you have someone vacuuming constantly, it will not be a persistent issue. You’d much prefer sounding a bit muffled over voice chat than having all the might of a vacuum cleaner behind you, for all to hear.
Connectivity
Utilizing a combination of both Bluetooth and a 2.4ghz dongle, you should be able to use the Lucidsound LS50X on both PC and Xbox, though we had a difficult time getting the audio for the headset through on PC, where it’s oddly recognized as an Xbox Controller through the included dongle.
We wish it had its own device certification for the headset, as it’d make mixing the audio channels coming through on Windows a hell of a lot easier. Alternatively, you can also choose to connect it up to your PC via Bluetooth, where we encountered no issues whatsoever.
Connecting it up to the Xbox worked pretty flawlessly, with the headset being picked up by the console via USB almost immediately. At this price point, the headset is competing with headsets that are much more multi-functional, with some even working on PS5. We would have liked to have seen a solution to this that’s not just ‘use Bluetooth’, which can be laggy if you are looking for super-responsive audio. It really seems like a missed trick here, since cheaper headsets manage to integrate this feature, but the LucidSound LS50X doesn’t while coming in at a higher price than most.
The audio mixing functionality on the earcups works well when you are using two audio sources. We found it to be really intuitive and easy to use, especially for those of you who might want to chat with your friends over in Discord, instead of simply being beholden to using Microsoft’s party chat functions.
There are no other big bells and whistles like an integrated DAC, and we ended up feeling like we just wanted a little bit more, for LucidSound to go the extra mile and really make this headset worth the cost of entry.
Battery Life
Throughout our testing process of the LucidSound LS50X, we found that the battery life is absolutely excellent, with at least 20 hours of audio before the headset needs a charge, this is in line with what’s plastered all over the box, and it’s really quite impressive. However, if you are running more than one audio channel at once through the headset, expect this to be slightly worse, as the headset needs a bit more juice to handle it. We’re very happy with how the LucidSound LS50X performed here, as it won’t be cutting out on you at inopportune times.
Should you buy it?
The LucidsSound LS50X is an incredibly well-built gaming headset. However it can get uncomfortable during use, and it doesn’t have the kind of features that we’d like to see when it comes to a headset coming in at this price. It has great audio and microphone quality but falters when it comes to the extra frills that you’d come to expect at this segment in the market. There are other headsets of comparable quality that come in cheaper, and just boast more features than the LS50X. You might be sacrificing the build quality, but that’s really all that you’d be giving up.
7/10
While the LucidSound LS50X has all of the audio quality you’d come to expect at this steep pricepoint but misses out on every little “nice to have” that many other headsets in this segment manage to achieve, whether that be an included DAC, a switch to make the 2.4Ghz wireless dongle truly cross-platform and more. It’s far from being bad, it just isn’t one of the best that you can buy. The headset regularly goes on sale, so be sure to look out for it during shopping events like Prime Day.