In 2022, BEACN released the first piece of gear in its product line. Since then, releases have been slow but deliberate. The team clearly puts a lot of thought into each item, so nothing gets rushed out. That is why I got excited by the announcement of its latest device, the BEACN Headset, because its claims about the audio experience, both as a set of headphones and as a microphone, were actually believable.
In the box, you get the BEACN Headset, with soft, faux-leather earpads, swappable fabric earpads, a detachable microphone, a wireless dongle, a USB extension cord, a TRRS-to-TRRS cable, a USB-A-to-USB-C cable, a carrying pouch and the documentation. Everything you need to operate the headset is on the left ear cup: the power button (which you can also press to check the battery life), a volume wheel, and the mute button. Mute indicators are also delivered audibly when the button is pressed.
At the bottom of the BEACN Headset, you have a USB port for charging, a 3.5 mm jack for a wired audio connection, and the jack for connecting the microphone. The ports are all quite close together, but spaced out enough that, if you happened to be using them all at once, they would not get in each other’s way. At the top of the headset, you will find the microphone used for noise cancellation.
The earpads, both types, on the BEACN Headset are incredibly comfortable. The fabric earpads are breathable and perfect for people who wear the headset for long stretches, while the faux-leather pads give you that traditional studio headphone feel. They also will not pick up pet hair like fabric pads do, if that is a concern in your house.
“The earpads, both types, on the BEACN Headset are incredibly comfortable.”
The headset also allows the ear cups to pivot in all directions for a perfect fit, but there is one gripe, even though it is not my gripe. For the smaller-headed people out there, the cups do not create a perfect seal around the ears when you wear them, at least for people who do not extend the headphones at all. The bottom of each cup points outward, leaving an opening and allowing outside noise to come in. My head, which is particularly large, does not present this issue when wearing the headset, but people with smaller heads should be fairly warned.
The BEACN Headset connects wirelessly via the provided dongle, which has a USB-C connector but can also connect to a USB-A port with the extension cord. There is also a Bluetooth connection, activated with a double-click of the power button, but the dongle provides a virtually latency-free audio experience. I am even able to monitor the microphone on the headset without a speech-jamming delay, which I have never experienced on another wireless headset.
The BEACN Headset gets its biggest boosts through the settings found in the BEACN App. There are brand-new settings for the headphones’ sound profile and the headset microphone chain, all with the same level of detail you find in the BEACN Mic. The EQ provides well-thought-out presets for real-world use cases and offers guides that explain which frequencies produce which sounds, letting you create a setup custom-made for your voice and how you listen.
This is also where profiles come in handy. How you need to sound on a podcast is different from how you might want to sound while gaming with your buddies. The EQ for listening to tunes is going to be much different from when you are trying to be immersed in a game. It is really simple to set up multiple profiles in the BEACN App and switch them at will.
The audio quality of the BEACN Headset is insanely rich. I have headphones made for all sorts of purposes. I have broadcast-quality headphones. I have immersive gaming headphones. I have headphones built for music. The BEACN Headset is the best of all worlds, outperforming all of those headphones in many ways. Weeks of using the headset exclusively for all of my tasks had me putting all the other headphones in a closet. The depth and accuracy of the sound when listening to music, gaming and editing was uncanny.
“The BEACN Headset gets its biggest boosts through the settings found in the BEACN App.”
As for the microphone on the BEACN Headset, I was more hesitant to be excited about this when I first heard about it, because companies make a lot of big claims that you can use their headset microphone as your microphone on stream, and not a single company has delivered. It was not until I had the chance to hear the quality for myself during a demonstration using a prototype last year that I thought, “Maybe BEACN can do it.”
And they did.
Is the sound from the BEACN Headset’s microphone as robust as a high-end dynamic microphone? No. Is it a perfectly acceptable microphone for broadcast use on a stream? Absolutely. Especially given the work you can do with the EQ to get the sound as close as possible to that of a studio microphone, without the internal hardware that makes studio microphones so great. And, as with the BEACN Mic, you are not going to experience any clipping, even when screaming at your squad. In my experience, it is the best-quality microphone a company in this space has delivered on a headset.
At $349 USD, the BEACN Headset is definitely at the higher end of prices for wireless headsets, in line with some other companies’ top offerings, but I would argue that it offers the most well-rounded experience and one of the only microphones that I would say has any place in a broadcast.
The BEACN Headset, like the rest of the brand’s product line, is thoughtfully designed to deliver something different while aligning perfectly with the company’s own workflows. It works seamlessly with the BEACN App and is as easy to configure and use as all of the company’s other products. Of the ones I have tested, it is my favourite all-around headset.
