I recently spent a lot of time with the Plantronics GameCom P80 wireless headset for PC and PS4 and I have some interesting thoughts to share. The P80 is a wireless headset with plug & play compability with both the PS4 (just plug it in) and the PC and featured music controls on the side along with a mic on/off function (on when down, off when up) to help avoid any unnecessary IRL conversations leaking into your games.

There are a lot of wireless headsets out there for consoles and even more wireless headset blues, so we'll be looking at the comfort, sound quality, microphone quality, and other components of this headset to see if it's worth a buy.

Comfort

The headset is very lightweight and barely noticeable on your head. This is really relevant to me, because I wear headphones throughout most of the day and they have to be lightweight or it’ll drive me insane. If I can forget I’m wearing something on my head, then it’s actually really hype in my world. So for this headset, considering there wasn’t a cable constantly reminding me it wasn’t there combined with how lightweight they were, I’d often forget they were on my head.

To this extent, I didn’t find any fatigue in wearing them for long periods of time. My ears didn’t get hot no matter how long I kept them on my ears (but I loaned them to my roommate who found his ears got a little bit warm after a few hours), which is very important for me because if anything bothers my head then it’s game off.

The headset is made with cloth, which explains why it’s in the lower price range and is an obvious cost saving measure and I didn’t mind it. Because it is so light and some of the materials aren’t the absolute best, it can come off as feeling a bit cheap.

The headset can extend to fit your head, it fit my just fine with the top band never really bothering me.

Overall, I would definitely say that this headset is comfortable.

Sound Quality

While obviously this isn’t the most premium headset out there, the sound does come in better than a lot of headsets you’d buy for twice the price, which is the best compliment I can give a headset.

Running it through a series of tests, it performs well across the board for sound quality. No hiss, buzz, or anything muddying the sound. Speaking about the range, there isn’t any hiss or static at any reasonable distance from the dongle. My PC is rather far from my desk, and right now I’m not hearing any static, which is really impressive for a wireless headset.

While not billed as a surround sound headset, surround sound is important, and it gets at least approximately 30 to 40 degrees of variance left and right, which is enough to clearly figure out which direction footsteps or other noises are coming from. Left, right, and center are very distinctive.

Music is fine and the bass was rather good and the stereo was really good. It has a really good bass level for this price range.

Microphone Quality

The microphone is very clear in my various tests (asking friends on PSN, Teamspeak, etc. to listen and recording it myself). The microphone is bendable, allowing movement closer to your mouth, but it will pick up noise from breathing / a fan, so you’ll want to adjust it.

I can’t really comment beyond the fact that the microphone is clear / clean / crisp. It’s not studio quality audio or anything insane like that, but it does a rather good job.

Other Notes (battery, connectivity, etc.)

Upon receiving the headset, I got it work with both my PC and PS4 nearly instantly, with Skype doing its usual hey I found a new device. This is important, because I’ve had many wireless headsets reach this awkward point where everything is charged and ready to go, but nothing is happening.

It doesn’t come with a bag, which I literally could care less about. You only get the USB dongle, headset, and mini-USB charging cable in the box. That’s all you get, which is all you really need.

For the PlayStation 4 this headset is a literal godsend. It has a long battery life, I’ve not ran out of power yet (although I haven’t used ‘em for more than 5 or so hours at a time before taking a break and letting it charge). The range is rather good, so I don’t have to worry about distortion and the such.

Speaking of battery life, I just charged it from dead for about 15 minutes (I had let it run out). I turned it on to do some more testing for this article, got up for about 4 hours, came back and it’s still running just fine.

The buttons on the side are nice, and are easy to use once you get it going.

Setup, like I had previously said, was easy. The headphones came pre-paired.

There is no charging cradle, you have to plug it into a USB cable. The cable that is included is short, but long enough that you could leave plugged into your PS4 to let it charge overnight or use a USB wall charger for it.

Conclusion

The headphones are rather right for the price level (MSRP $79.99). They’re comfortable, although the cloth can get a tiny bit warm after a while. Good range, sound quality, and microphone. Nothing really alienated me or annoyed me at all with them, unless I was to consider them way above their price level.

I’d say they’re a safe beat if you’re looking for a wireless gaming headset, especially for the PS4. While you might want to go a bit more high-end for something you’d use at the PC, these are absolutely amazing for gaming session on the console, so that’s my opinion on the matter.

For full disclosure, a review unit was supplied.