Corsair HS55 Wireless Core Review – No cable, no RGB and no real highlights

1 - Introduction and technical data 2 - Look, feel and wearing comfort 3 - Teardown: Ear pads, speaker and inner design 4 - Test setup, measurements and analysis 5 - Soundcheck, subjective sound analysis and conclusion

Ear cushions

They could also be a little bigger and the processed cold foam a little more resistant. But the sponges covered with PU synthetic leather are at least soft, even if it offers a bit of the flair of French car seats: soft and without real lateral support. The inserted plastic ring for stabilization doesn’t really help, but at least you won’t get any bruises or red marks. In return, it gets damp over time, because there is no venting. Nevertheless, the conclusion is rather positive and the criticism has to be seen in the context of the price.

You can see it very well in the pictures (above and below) that the four lugs of the inner ring are hooked to the ear cup and you can remove or reattach the pads with a simple twist.

Teardown

The picture below also shows the speaker, i.e. the driver, which sits behind the cover and cannot radiate very freely. Here, one can certainly also locate a part of the weak points in the high frequencies, but this cannot be modded so easily. You can also see the three screws with which this cover, which supports the driver, was screwed on. This can be solved and unfolded relatively easily and uncomplicatedly

The installed 50 mm neodymium driver was firmly glued in and not just pressed in, which actually makes a non-destructive replacement impossible.

If you now look at the rest inside, things get interesting. I have unscrewed the left side here, where the electrical inner workings are also located, so to speak. On the right, only the two buttons have been placed on a small circuit board and then wired to the left side via the headband. The circuit board with the Bluetooth/2.4 GHz radio module and the amplifier is from ShenZhen Golden Board Circuit Co Ltd and has no special features. You don’t get Slipstream, which is unfortunate because the latencies aren’t that plump and the microphone channel’s data rate is set way too low (so the compression is too high). But more on that in a moment.

The 3.7 volt battery with a capacity of 350 mAh is firmly soldered onto another circuit board, which also contains the charging electronics with a 5V feed. It also sticks to a piece of foam rubber, which, interestingly enough, also sticks in the other shell, where it significantly reduces the rather high internal volume. What’s missing is any kind of damping, which is a pity because you could reduce the audible reverberation in the bass range with it. However, since the manufacturer was criticized for its rather neutral low-frequency headsets in the higher price ranges, they probably opted for the typical Call of Duty bass bomber again.

The fact that a certain bass volume is generated here, which cannot sound natural, certainly does not matter to the bass-hungry gamer, so it is just the way it is. And we’ll see in a moment that I’m proven right when it comes to the headset’s decay curves and vibration behavior. So please keep scrolling!