Astro remains an industry-leader for a good reason: their products are great. I’ve been using Astro headsets on-and-off as my go-to headsets for years, especially for their ability to mix sound from different sources seamlessly and easily. Most of Astro’s competitors fall back on Bluetooth to gain this capability, but as anyone who has ever used Bluetooth can attest: Bluetooth is garbage. Astro’s A50 headset and the A40 MixAmp let you feed SPDIF optical audio as a secondary sound source and then combine that with USB audio from a PC, which has been ideal for me while streaming games from my console to my PC’s capture card. Being able to grab Xbox audio wirelessly with the Astro A50 charging dock and mix that with comms from my PC is just awesome and something no other headset on the market offers right now. The A50 has been a staple on our best headset roundups, and takes a spot on our best Xbox Series X and Series S headsets list for its versatility.
While Astro audio is generally great, I’m not a huge fan of the Astro implementation of Dolby surround, as it injects some weird echoing quality into the sound mix. Thankfully, you can typically turn this off and use Dolby Atmos or Windows Sonic as an alternative to get some surround experience with a more naturalistic soundscape.
Astro headsets generally come with a “brand tax” similar to Razer and some of the other big names. As a result, I often feel like you can get better audio and comfort for a bit less from some of Astro’s competitors. For wireless headsets, I tend to prefer the LucidSound LS50Xand LS35X, and for wired options, I feel like headsets like the HyperX CloudX offer more bang-for-buck both in terms of sound and construction. Where Astro typically beats the competition is multi-platform versatility and software. It all just works, and Astro doesn’t ask you to fiddle around with half-baked installers or strange firmware updating rituals to update their products.
The Astro software for Windows is by far the best on the market right now, making firmware updates a simple and easy process, with plenty of configuration. When it comes to balancing ease of use with comfort and quality, Astro is probably top of the pile. And at the top of that pile sits the incredible Astro A50.