Credit: Fergus Halliday | IDG
Building on the strengths of last year’s ROG Delta headphones, ASUS have now looked to draw additional audiophiles to their ecosystem with the new ROG Theta and Theta Electret gaming headphones
The ROG Theta itself is a set of over-ear headphones that draws no less than eight Essence drivers and four ESS9 601 buffers to deliver an immersive 7.1 virtual surround sound.
Interestingly not one of these drivers handles the bass. Instead, ASUS have opted to removed bass driver and made each other drivers larger.
ASUS say their logic here is that game developers aren’t optimizing experiences for true 7.1 audio and that a dedicated bass driver is often wasted.
The ROG Theta headset also boasts an AI-enhanced noise cancelling mic that’s been trained to eliminate unwanted noise on a pool of over 5 million samples. That's a pretty big number but we’ll probably have to wait to spend a little more hands-on time with the Theta before we can say whether that training has paid off.
Regardless, if the baseline ROG Theta package isn't audiophile enough for you, the new headset comes accompanied by the ROG Theta Electret.
The ROG Theta Electret incorporates both electret and dynamic drivers, silver-plated copper cabling and boasts an impedance of 32 Ohms. ASUS say the Theta Electric utilizes a dual driver system where dynamic bass driver to pick up where the electret driver leaves off.
We had a brief chance to go hands on with the Theta and Theta Electret and came away pretty impressed. They sounded really good, even if they were noticeably heavier than similar gaming headphones. Whether they sound good enough to justify what is sure to be a significant premium over other gaming headphones, we'll have to see.
Australian pricing for the ASUS ROG Theta and Theta Electret gaming headset has yet to be announced but ASUS say both will land in Australia around September 2019.
