Highly customizable audio gear rarely comes cheap. V-Moda, for example, lets you choose colors, texture and laser engraving on its $280 audiophile-targeted Crossfade 2 headphones. But moderately-priced gaming headphones? It’s much harder to find cans you can personalize. That’s why the Scuf H1 wired gaming headset is so intriguing; for a starting price of $130, there are no fewer than 6 design elements you can customize, plus the option to swap out the graphical plates covering the earcups anytime you like. The question, of course, is if there’s anything here for gamers aside from style points.
Scuf H1 – Design and Features
You don’t have to go very far to compare the Scuf H1 to another popular headphone. Now a part of the Corsair family, Scuf has based the H1 on the Corsair Virtuoso, a modestly styled wireless headset that gets great marks for sound quality. Scuf has taken the overall Virtuoso aesthetic, changed it to a wired connection, and applied a heavy dose of customization. The result is a gaming headset that is utterly unique.
Like the Corsair that this headset is based on, the H1 has large, comfortable ear pads and a nicely cushioned headband. The headband should accommodate a wide variety of head shapes and sizes; it expands by nearly 1-3/8-inch on each side with 11 detents to lock in your preferred position. And the earcups pivot a full 90 degrees in both directions.
The frame applies surprisingly little pressure on your noggin – if your head is anything like mine, you’ll never feel like you’re wearing a vice clamp on your head, which makes it comfortable for all-day wear. In fact, I wore the H1 for 4-5 hours at a time on multiple occasions, and it never bothered me at all. My ears didn’t even overheat, despite being wrapped in memory foam. On the other hand, the H1’s light touch makes them a bit “sloshy” – if you turn your head quickly, they don’t stay put, which you might not care for very much. Personally, I preferred that to more clamping pressure.
At the bottom of the left cup you’ll find a 3.5mm audio jack (which makes it universally compatible with PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox, Switch and more) and the detachable microphone port. The left/right legend is almost invisible on the inner shoulder of the headband – good luck reading that in the dark – but with the microphone stationed on the left, it’s hard to put it on backwards.
You get a 6-foot audio cable with inline controls 12 inches from the headphone end. The volume control is easy to spin by feel alone, and there’s a microphone mute slider you can manipulate without peeking as well.
The most intriguing aspect of the H1’s design, though, is its customization, which is surprisingly extensive. When you order the H1 on Scuf’s website, you get to configure the headset as if you were building a custom PC. You choose the base color (black or white), speaker tag (more on that in a moment), and which of six ring colors will accent the earcup. From there, you also choose the ear cushion material – the standard synthetic leather or a somewhat comfier hybrid of synthetic leather and cloth. You can choose between a uni-directional or omni-directional microphone and even whether you want the audio cable (and inline controls) to be black or gray.
If the H1 has a signature feature, it’s probably the speaker tags. These magnetic plates easily pop on and off the earcups to jazz up your mostly-white or mostly-black headphones. There are roughly 30 tags to choose from – a half-dozen solid colors, a few camouflage patterns, and then a rich assortment of cool, colorful designs that range from star patterns to splatter art to other snazzy designs. You get to pick one tag when you build your headphones and buy others a la carte if you want to swap around within a collection of tags later on.
All this customization adds up, though. The base H1 costs $130, but most options cost extra. There are three “free” tags – black, white or red – and the rest vary from $10 to $30, depending on the design. The upgraded ear cushion and omni-directional mic are an extra $10 each. If you deck out your H1 with every premium option, the final price climbs to $172, and adding extra tags later can become an expensive pastime, so I suspect most people will stick to owning just one or two. That said, I’ve been wrong before about how much money people are willing to spend accessorizing stuff, so if collecting tags is your jam, godspeed to you.
Scuf H1 – Performance
I ran the headset through its paces in music, movies and games. The earcups are built around large 50mm neodymium speaker drivers that delivered a solid audio experience overall, particularly for gaming. I am not certain if the Scuf H1 has the same guts as the Virtuoso it’s based on, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the two headphones were substantially the same. I enjoyed the Virtuoso except for its infernal clamping pressure, and these headphones seem to have a very similar sound profile, minus the skull pain.
While these headphones don’t have a lot of bass power, the low end was still well represented – explosions were visceral, and when playing GTA5, I enjoyed the music playing in my car. Even so, the headphones are clearly tuned for the midrange, and that paid off in games like Call of Duty: Warzone, in which footsteps, ambient noises and weapons handling were crisp and articulate – and though there’s obviously no virtual surround sound (these are analog, without any software for digital processing), the stereo separation was superb, making it easy to pick out directionality.
I also really enjoyed wearing these headphones for private movie watching; when I spun up Netflix, I found that dialog was crisp and understandable, sound effects were visceral and the soundtrack was well-rendered. And just like with gaming, there was excellent stereo separation throughout.
Chances are that you’ll sometimes want to use the H1 for music as well, and here’s where I was somewhat less impressed. In short sessions the headphones were fine, but for longer listening I found them less than ideal. They certainly didn’t sound bad per se, but I found they weren’t really tuned for music. As one example, I found that 50 Foot Wave’s grungy psychedelic opus Power + Light was the perfect storm of things I didn’t care for in the H1: simultaneously boomy and too bright, which had the overall effect of sounding somewhat harsh.
On the other hand, I loved the H1’s detachable microphone – both the fact that it popped off easily when you don’t need it and how well it performed. The mic is mounted at the end of a flexible boom that (mostly) stays where you put it. You have two choices when customizing the headphones: the default uni-directional or an omni-directional for an additional $10.
This H1 came with the omni-directional, and it performed superbly – 5 by 5, as they say in the military, delivering excellent clarity during chat sessions without picking up background noise like typing on my keyboard or the buzz of my 3D printer. It was definitely susceptible to popping from plosives, but that’s not going to be a problem for routine chats; just don’t record a podcast with this headset, and you’ll be fine. One other thing to keep in mind: There’s no mic monitoring here, so you might have trouble hearing yourself if there’s a lot happening in the earcups when you’re talking.