Taking a Closer Look:
Design-wise, the Icemat Siberia is a pair of circumaural (covering the ears), open-air (design that allows air in, non-isolation) pair of headphones. On the inside the round earpieces have velvet over the padding, much better then your usual fake leather. The earpieces themselves are fixed to two springy wires for horizontal pressure. Vertical fixation is achieved by having a stretch of a bungee let go of four wires, two for each side, connect to each earphone respectively. That part of headphones is also covered with velvet underneath, where it touches your head. Notably the headphones have been designed to be completely sound-transparent which can be obvious due to a set of holes around the grill on each earpiece. This is either good or bad. If you want to hear things, like your teammates at a LAN or a phone ringing, it’s great.
The cord is an interesting creation all together. First of all, its thick, which is good, and has many thin ridges, which is odd, but cute. Besides that, it has plastic extensions every 40-50cm for griping the microphone cord. Overall, the headphones are very comfortable; feel expensive, elegant, and almost lavish. The connectors are also of good quality and are much better than the standard ones. They use the 3.5mm jack form on both the microphone and headphones and also include a 3.5 to 6.3 adapter for use in stereos etc.
The microphone is quite an important part of the sound peripherals. That is, if you use it. The Siberia microphone is your standard microphone that doesn’t show anything special in the quality department and produces a fairly standard sound. It does have an on/off switch and a long cable. As mentioned, it can be attached to your Siberia headphones cord and will stays out of the way for most of the part. My only gripe is that there is no other means of having it in usable proximity besides the crocodile clip and stickers by which you are directed to attach to your monitor. For VoIP and Teamspeak, a headphone extension would be much more useful.
The sound quality on these headphones did not disappoint at all. From watching DVD’s, listening to CD’s, to some intense gaming. I must admit I was a little bias during testing. Having never owned a set of high performance headphones before I was blown away when I heard bass coming out of them during a rock track! Both bass and vocal sounds were crisp and clear and the bass sounded punchy from both the PC and the MP3 player. It was only after listening to rock tracks for a few hours I realized the bass wasn’t as deep as it should have been, this is most likely due to the open air design of the headphones. One thing I did notice was that if the extended cable with the volume control is being used it is possible to generate more bass. Simply set the source (mp3 player, PC) to a high volume and reduce the cable volume to about half way, this gives much deeper bass.
USB Sound Card
