Roccat Syn Pro Air - Review

Roccat’s newest headset, the Syn Pro Air, has some appealing qualities on paper. It looks sharp. It’s got RGB lighting with a style unique among headsets. It has some neat features and upgrades, including 3D audio and a detachable mic with flip-to-mute functionality, a rare combination at the moment. Those flourishes, enticing as they are, fall flat in the face of some larger problems. Its loose fit leads to annoying adjustment issues. Pairing the headset takes a little longer than it should. Meanwhile, Roccat’s new configuration app, which launched alongside it, is a mess. The Roccat Syn Pro Air’s problems outweigh its achievements, showing that a makeover and flashy features can’t hide a headset’s fundamental flaws.

Syn Pro Air – Design & Features

At a glance, every part of the Syn Pro Air looks like it’s designed to stand out from other, similar gaming headsets. The all-plastic top band and ear cups are covered with a thick, slightly scratchy mesh padding. Instead of sliding interlocked pieces inside the top band, the forks adjust via a pair of sliding cylinders locked onto the outside of the frame. RGB lighting in the base of each earpiece reveals a plastic honeycomb design underneath the plastic chassis, mirroring the design from Roccat’s recent mice, such as the Roccat Burst Pro and Kone Pro Air. These design nuances are only noticeable up close, but they give the Syn Pro Air a pop of personality.

The Syn Pro Air’s all-plastic frame makes for a light headset – 311 grams – without compromising its durability. A light headset is a comfortable headset, but the design has its issues. The top band is very wide so the headset doesn’t clamp, even on my fairly large noggin. It slides out of position very easily, and may even fall off if you shake your head forcefully. Despite the loose fit, it still provides a decent amount of passive noise-cancellation, reducing the impact of nearby ambient noise.

The earcup adjustment mechanism is also loose: When hung from a desk-mounted headphone hook, the earcups slid down and out of place. And without notches or numbers on the cylinders, you have to rediscover your ideal fit every time you put them on. On the plus side, the forks rotate, so you can lay the earcups flat on your chest or a desk.

Speaking of earcups, the mesh-coated earpieces are large, roomy, and heavily cushioned with a firm memory foam. Without any meaningful clamp from the top band, you don’t really feel cushioning much, but the wide padding helps the cups fit right and feel comfortable. Inside, the headset features 50mm drivers, which is standard for a mid-to-high-end headset.

There aren’t a ton of onboard controls and ports on the Syn Pro Air. On the left earcup, you have a volume control wheel, a power button, and a USB-C charging port. On the right, you have a second wheel, which lets you adjust mic monitoring in your headphone mix. It’s worth noting that the headset does not allow you to establish a wired connection via USB-C, so you’ll need to keep the dongle plugged in if you want to continue using it while charging.

The Syn Pro Air relies on a 2.4 GHz wireless connection via a USB dongle. It generally supplies a reliable, low-latency connection, which can keep up with competitive and non-competitive gameplay experiences… Once it’s connected, that is. Over more than a week of testing, I found that the Syn Pro Air and its wireless dongle frequently had trouble syncing up. In theory, when you turn on the headset, it should automatically pair with the dongle and start working effortlessly. In practice, the headset needs to be within a few inches of the wireless dongle to pair. I found myself laying the headset next to the dongle on top of my desktop for about 20-30 seconds every time I turned it on. The connection is great once the headset and dongle find each other, but the pairing process is far more painful than it needs to be.

On the plus side, it gets decent, if not stellar battery life. According to Roccat, the headset should last up to 16 hours on a full charge with the RGB lighting on, or 24 hours with RGBs off. I found the headset lasted through 3-4 days of everyday use, including gaming and work. That isn’t bad, but it isn’t outstanding, either. On the plus side, it features USB-C rapid-charging that can bring the headset back to a full charge in less than an hour.

The Syn Pro Air has an interesting detachable microphone. The long, popsicle-stick-shaped boom is larger than what you’d get with most detachable mics, and slightly less pliable. But it comes with a bonus; a rotating base that lets you flip the boom up when it isn’t in use, which automatically mutes the microphone. Flip-to-mute is common among headsets with permanently affixed microphones, but it’s pretty rare to see a detachable flip-up mic.  

Syn Pro Air – Software

Roccat released a new configuration app alongside the Syn Pro Air called Roccat Neon, a sleek, streamlined app that allows you to adjust your audio mix, toggle virtual surround sound settings, and adjust the headset’s RGB lighting, among other things. It’s simple, looks clean, and makes it easy to find all of its settings. The app is only compatible with the Syn Pro Air for now, but the Roccat website suggests that it will become a universal configuration app for its peripherals.

For now, Neon is in beta, which you may accept as a reasonable excuse for why it doesn’t entirely work at the moment. Neon has a fair number of customizable options available, but not every setting works as expected. For example, the RGB lighting controls allow you to switch between a rotating pre-set pattern and Roccat’s AI-driven Aimo lighting mode, but don’t allow you to set the two discrete RGB lighting zones to specific colors. In the main settings menu, some options, like the 3D audio toggle, feature info buttons that don’t prompt any explanatory text.

There are also some features that I’d argue should be present, but aren’t available. Neon has an EQ menu that lets you tweak your audio mix, but doesn’t provide any presets or allow you to save custom profiles. None of the audio settings feature any kind of quick sound test, so you’ll have to bring your own.

On the plus side, Roccat has already taken steps to fix some of the larger issues present when I began this review, so the app is demonstrably heading towards full functionality. Still, at the current rate I wouldn’t expect Neon to be a capable app for at least a few months. Until that time, Neon’s half-baked feature-set undercuts many of the Syn Pro Air’s special features.

Syn Pro Air – Gaming 

Setting aside the settings, the Syn Pro Air delivers good, though not necessarily impressive audio. Its smooth, balanced sound presents as clean and clear for easy listening. When you take a closer listen, though, it lacks the detail you’d expect from a top-flight headset. 

In Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, you can hear the difference between when a bullet whizzes by in the open air or pings off a metal wall, but the latter sounds slightly dull. Even with Turtle Beach’s signature “Superhuman Hearing,” a performance-focused feature that makes footsteps easier to hear, I really needed to concentrate to follow the sounds of other players’ movements. Unlike past versions of the feature, however, Superhuman Hearing didn’t noticeably degrade the game’s audio quality – a problem that normally leads me to steer clear of it – so I’m cautiously optimistic that it may become more usable in Roccat and Turtle Beach’s future headsets.

The Syn Pro Air is Roccat’s first stab at 3D audio, expanding the virtual surround sound experience to incorporate angles above and below you. In Black Ops Cold War, you can follow players as they move up and down stairs or scale structures. As with the Superhuman Hearing, I found it was more difficult than expected to keep tabs on other players this way, but it does allow for more precision when you put in the effort.

In terms of chat, the Syn Pro Air’s microphone is very capable. Even with limited articulation, it’s easy to get it into a position where people can hear you loud and clear. That said, it also picks up a lot of ambient noise without any meaningful noise-cancelling countermeasures.