ROCCAT Elo X Stereo Headphones Review: A good price let down by its sound

Sometimes you just want some headphones that you can reach out to if your preferred ones are either out of battery or being borrowed. It’s where the budget headphones come to the fold; as long as they output sound as a minimum, that’s the main thing.

This is where Roccat arrive. They are another competitor in the headphone space, recently introducing the

Elo X Stereo

, a low-budget variant of their many headphones available.

These attempt to combine the comfortable design they’ve accomplished with their previous headphones, while being able to offer clear sound for many use cases.

Roccat achieves one of these points well, but this is why you should be using these as a backup, or even for podcast recording when needed.

Design - Score 80

First of all, headphones need to be comfortable. It’s one of two important factors when looking into new headphones, alongside how good the sound is. Here the Elo X Stereo succeeds, with its metal headband able to adjust to any head while having comfort as a priority.

This also extends to the cups, where there is leather padding to help support any pairs of ears, and not once was there a need to take these off due to discomfort.

With the design itself, it gives off a ‘mechanical’ vibe, with wires shown between the cups and the headband, the metal top with the angular curves back to the cups. It doesn’t look clean, it looks as if someone has spent time in a garage creating this design with many rulers. But it's irrelevant when they are comfortable to wear.

These are not wireless, just the wired kind of headphones, so you will have compatibility with a huge variety of devices, except those that lack a headphone jack, so expect to use adapters here.

It also has a detachable microphone so you can enable it when you need to join in a voice chat with friends. It’s convenient but we feel that a retractable one would have sufficed regardless.

Sound - Score 60

There’s always a collection of songs that I use to test headphones at Stealth, and one that helps me decide on just how well certain aspects of the headphones’ sound work is this:

https://youtu.be/if7lm4UEoZ8?t=57

It’s the perfect kind of music that has the drums, the loudness and the rhythm to help judge any sound quality. While these headphones did well on the treble, it didn’t do well on the bass and volume of the scene.

Everything sounded flat unfortunately, and I had to turn the volume up far beyond the levels I usually do, just to not have it drowned out by surrounding sounds in my area.

Price - Score 80

Sometimes you need a pair of headphones that have a backup; headphones that simply do the job when needed. For £39.99, these are perfectly priced for that. You get comfort alongside average sound.

These aren’t going to break the bank; you get what you pay for, and Roccat achieve this in droves.

Our Score

Pros

• Comfy Design
• Affordable Price
• Detachable Microphone

Cons

• Awkward Design
• Wired
• Muffled Microphone at times

For budget-headphones such as these, they do the job, but they fail in one primary aspect, and that’s sound.

They just sounded very flat in the many devices and games that I tried; there was barely any reverberation in the bass and everything just sounded tinny, which is a huge shame here.

But for £39.99, we recommend them as backup headphones; for the times where your primary headphones either run out of charge or you’re lending them to a friend. But for anything else, we’d recommend looking at something from Skullcandy at this price-point if you want something more.