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Turtle Beach Xbox Recon Controller Review: Game Audio Mixing Made Easy
RRP $ 60.00
"The Turtle Beach Xbox Recon Controller is packed with imaginative and useful on-board features at a shockingly low price."
advantages
Great build quality
Robust audio control
Well placed buttons on the back
Useful pro-aim function
Excellent value for money
disadvantage
Wired only
Contradicting functions
Whenever a new video game console drops, third-party manufacturers get to work. There is always a race to see who can make indispensable accessories that trump the console manufacturers themselves. This is especially evident with controllers, where companies are taking on the impossible task of improving gamepads perfectly designed by giants like Sony and Microsoft.
It takes a lot of creative effort to achieve this lofty goal, but Turtle Beach struck gold with its Recon Xbox controller. Instead of trying to surpass the basic capabilities of a regular Xbox controller, it offers a whole new vision of what a controller can do. Turtle Beach essentially built a sound mixer into a controller that allows players to EQ audio, adjust game volume, and even control voice chat on the fly. It's exactly the kind of innovation you can expect from a company best known for their headsets.
The Xbox Recon is not just a niche product for the dedicated audiophile; It's an excellent console companion that rethinks the usefulness of a controller. Its wired setup and some complicated options keep it from being the ultimate Xbox controller, but a low price point makes it a serious alternative to Microsoft's baseline X Series controllers.
With every third-party controller, there is always one major hurdle that must be met: It must have all of the basic functions of its first-party counterpart. Companies like PowerA have developed complex controllers for consoles like the Nintendo Switch that add extra functionality at the expense of rumble and amiibo support.
The Recon does not cut off such corners. It has everything you'd expect from an Xbox Series X controller. The button layout is identical, with minor adjustments in some positions. The joysticks don't feel too different, it rumbles as expected, and even includes an eight-way D-pad that some other third-party Xbox pads lack. Even with small differences, everything is in its place.
In fact, the Recon even goes a little further in some places. It includes cooling handles and has two mappable buttons on the back, neither of which are found on the standard Xbox wireless controller. Since it doesn't use batteries, it's also a bit lighter than Microsoft's controller.
The Recon does not cut off such corners. It has everything you'd expect from an Xbox Series X controller.
The only downside to this is that the Recon can feel a bit more toy-like than the sophisticated Xbox Wireless Controller. However, that is hardly a blow. Turtle Beach easily passes the first test here by creating a controller that ticks each box and adds some tweaks of its own while maintaining a comparable price range of $ 60.
If the recon just stopped there, it would be a perfectly suitable third-party option. But the fact that I haven't even talked about its core functionality speaks to how robust this package ultimately is. The Recon is designed for audio and offers several ways to optimize the sound in a mini command center on top of the controller.
With a few carefully placed buttons, players can adjust game and chat audio separately. This allows anyone to essentially mix audio on the fly without delving into menus and making adjustments. Usually you would need external tools to do this, so the fact that it is built right into the Recon is extremely useful. It even has a mute button that players can use to mute their microphone without fumbling for a button on their headset.
I can't think of a video game controller that ever aimed to do what Turtle Beach achieved here.
I noticed that the chat controls didn't seem to work properly on the PC games I tested. When playing the Back 4 Blood Beta through in-game chat, turning down the chat volume had no effect. This made it unclear to me exactly where I could use this feature outside of playing on an actual Xbox.
When it comes to audio, the controller goes one step further and offers four equalization presets that players can use to switch between different sound profiles. Turtle Beach's Signature Sound option allows players to boost bass, prioritize game chat, boost treble, or get a smoother mix. There's also a one-press button that activates Superhuman Hearing, which amplifies soft noises like footsteps (although I've found it generally just crank everything up).
All of this comes together to give players complete control over the game audio. While playing Last Stop, I was able to quickly switch my EQ to prioritize voices on the fly. During a music montage, I might as well turn up the bass to round off the orchestral score. Players will most likely pick their favorite presets and leave it at that, but I just turned the page for novelty.
I have to emphasize how impressive it is that all of this happens without any software or driver installation whatsoever. All of these options are housed in the controller itself. I can't think of a video game controller that ever aimed to do what Turtle Beach achieved here. The ability to set mic monitoring or boost the bass like pressing a button to jump is extremely impressive and makes the Recon a truly unique controller.
With all of its bells and whistles, the Recon still has a few notable quirks. Most importantly, it is a fully wired controller which is the main sticking point. For those who don't want to thread chicken wire from their Series X onto the couch, this might be a tough sell. It doesn't help that players have to use wired headphones here as well and add some cable juggling. That makes the Recon more of a focal point for my PC than my Xbox, as playing with tethering is more common in my own PC setup.
It's filled with great features, though each adds to the assembly complexity of the device.
The controller also has two mappable back buttons that are completely unobtrusive, although this is not without its problems. The triggers cannot be assigned to the back buttons for some reason, nor can button combinations. On the plus side, players can set up four different mapping profiles and quickly switch between them. For example, I had mapped A and B to one profile and set the right and left bumpers to a different one.
The back buttons also have some weird interactions with the Recon's other specialty feature (yes, there are more): Pro-Aim. When enabled, players can hold down the right backspace button to decrease stick sensitivity. For example, you could squeeze it while aiming down to drastically lower sensitivity in the blink of an eye and allow precise aiming. There are even four different presets for Pro-Aim. The only problem is, you can't actually map a control to the back button and use Pro-Aim at the same time, or you could jump every time you try to aim. It's an amazing feature for a controller, but one that bumps into the head with another option.
That is the story of the Recon in general. It's filled with great features, though each adds to the assembly complexity of the device. Trying to flip through EQ presets or map buttons on the fly can be a bit of a circus, and you can't always use all of the functions at the same time. Compared to the elegance of a regular Xbox controller, the Recon can definitely feel confusing the first time you use it.
But that's a necessary compromise when you consider how much the controller can do without external software. Turtle Beach loaded up a $ 60 controller with on-board features that other companies have yet to dream of. Considering the price and build quality at Microsoft are perfect, all you really need to do is take advantage of one extra feature to get your money's worth. Even if you just use Pro-Aim or something as small as the mute button, you get more functionality than a regular Xbox controller. It's shocking that this doesn't make players $ 100, but you won't hear me complaining about a good deal.
While third-party controllers can be a risky endeavor, the Xbox Recon reduces the noise by doubling the strengths of Turtle Beach. The audio-first controller offers gamers many practical functions that make it easy to optimize the sound mix in no time at all. Despite some notable quirks, Turtle Beach does something really unique here, which sets the Recon apart in a field that is only going to get more crowded.
For a simple wireless controller, the Xbox Series X baseline is still the best choice. The hybrid controller mixer setup is somewhat unique, however.
It's always hard to tell when it comes to third-party controllers, but Turtle Beach is known for quality products. It'll surprise you if you don't spend a few years on it.
Yes. The Xbox Recon is a surprisingly useful controller for gamers who use headphones in-game or anyone looking for some extra button customization.
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Eve Spectrum 4K
RRP $ 799.00
"The excellent design and image quality of Eve Spectrum 4K make the wait well."
advantages
Stunning, minimalist design
Excellent IPS panel implementation
HDMI 2.1 and 100 watt USB-C
Razor-sharp 4K image
Highly configurable panel settings
Sell without a stand to save money
disadvantage
Eva has a sketchy story
Overwhelming color performance with our sample
The mythical Eve Spectrum is a monitor you may have heard of. It was a fully crowdfunded show that was due out a year ago. But it never did. This left funders very disappointed as they feared they had lost their money to a project that would never come to fruition.
But lo and behold, to my surprise, I now have the test device of the 4K version in front of me.
The Eve Spectrum 4K is essentially everything a lot of gamers could want in a monitor: 4K, IPS, fast at 144 Hz, with HDMI 2.1, DisplayHDR 600, G-Sync / FreeSync, with all the panel optimization settings you can think of The OSD can only dream, a very minimalist design – the list goes on. The design was created in collaboration with the community and many players loved it.
But is the Eve Spectrum 4K good enough to become one of the best gaming monitors out there? Well – and maybe it was worth the wait.
Niels Broekhuijsen / Digital Trends
The Eve Spectrum is the most minimalist monitor I've ever seen. In itself it's just a 27-inch panel with very thin bezels and a power LED on the underside. And I'll say it for itself, because the standard $ 799 kit doesn't come with a stand – that will cost you an additional $ 99.
This is something that the community wanted and, in my opinion, a great move. The enthusiast market has a penchant for attaching monitors to wall mounts and monitor arms in the name of cleaner, more minimalist-looking setups, and I'm all for it. Heck, those mounts often cost less than $ 99 or so at this ballpark.
The styling of the Eve Spectrum is nothing more than clean and classy.
However, if you do, I am happy to announce that the booth is for the most part worth the price. It's beautifully machined and painted and feels like a high quality piece of kit. My only complaint? It's so slim you'll see the cables behind it. That, and at its lowest height, is still tall, with the bottom of the display just over 3 inches above the desk.
Otherwise, it has a full range of customizations, including rotating it to portrait. It doesn't pivot, but that doesn't really matter. The stand also has a recess under the foot to pass cables underneath, like your keyboard.
Other than that, the design of the Eve Spectrum monitor is very small. The backend only offers the connections and controls in a very clean, rectangular design. There is no aggressive, player-centered styling here – just clean and classy. I've always thought that less was more, and I really like the aesthetics of the Eve Spectrum.
Niels Broekhuijsen / Digital Trends
The Eve Spectrum I'm reviewing is the 4K model. Since this is a high refresh rate 4K panel, it is expected to include HDMI 2.1 – and it is here: The 4K Eve Spectrum includes a DisplayPort 1.4a input and two HDMI 2.1 ports. This makes it ideal for connection to your PC and two modern consoles, so that they can run in full RGB colors without chroma subsampling and with HDR activated at 4K and 120 Hz.
In addition, the display has a USB-C upstream port, which is ideal for docking the monitor with a single cable connection and display input, access to the USB hub and a power output of up to 100 watts via USB-C offers . It uses the DisplayPort protocol, and the OSD (on-screen display) lets you either prioritize the refresh rate to hit the full 144Hz, but with the USB hub running at USB 2.0 speeds, or the display at 60 Limit Hz, but USB 3.1. reserve bandwidth for the ports.
With HDMI 2.1 and USB-C with 100 W power, the Eve Spectrum offers the best connection options in the gaming monitor class
The only catch is that there's no ethernet port, so it's not a full-fledged hub. But chances are you're only using the USB-C docking feature for a second laptop besides your desktop anyway.
The USB hub itself has two USB-A and one USB-C ports, all of which run at USB 3.1 Gen 2 speeds for up to 10 Gbit / s bandwidth.
The display is powered by an external brick, but the power cord is on the short end. This means that especially if you mount the monitor on an arm and want to keep the cabling tidy, you want to have a cable tray under your desk that you can slide it into, as it won't dangle all the way to the floor without it.
On the back there are controls for the monitor, which consist of a direction switch and an on / off button. Pressing the switch takes you to the OSD of the display, which is one of the most extensive OSDs I have come across on a gaming monitor. Of course, you'll find the usual range of connectivity, system, color, and overdrive settings, but the Eve Spectrum has a few more tricks up its sleeve.
For gamers, Eve offers a cheating crosshair, an FPS counter, a low latency mode, adaptive sync settings, response time settings and strobing modes for the backlight. Of course, backlight strobing won't work with Adaptive-Sync enabled, but that's to be expected.
In the meantime, the OSD also includes settings to customize the behavior and colors of the Power LED with full RGB support. If you don't like the white light, just change it according to the colors of your setup. Isn't that neat?
However, there is one strange thing about the OSD: it's blurry. This is a 4K monitor, but the OSD is not very nicely designed, nor is it programmed to have the same sharp resolution as the display. But it's an OSD, and it's well-equipped, so do you really care that it doesn't look nice? It's also a bit slow to adjust values, and I would prefer to have a brightness adjustment option that doesn't require me to dig deep into the menu for quick changes. But unfortunately.
Niels Broekhuijsen / Digital Trends
The Eve Spectrum is based on the same panel as the LG 27GN950 that we tested last year and that was very good indeed. With that, the Eve Spectrum is off to a good start, and while the specs aren't all that different, Eve throws a factory calibration into the mix that claims a typical Delta-E (color difference from real) of 0.59, especially on our device in his attached report indicates a Delta-E of 0.5. As a reference, any number below 2.0 is considered good enough for professional editing, so I was anxious to double-check those numbers.
But there's more to it than just color accuracy. The IPS panel offers a resolution of 4K (3840 x 2160) for razor-sharp images, has an advertised static contrast ratio of 1000: 1, as is expected from IPS panels, and can display up to 1.07 billion colors since it a 10. is bit (8 bit + FRC) panel.
I was disappointed when testing the display's color performance. Brightness and contrast tests were great and delivered a good 500 nits of brightness at 100% and achieved the promised contrast ratio of 1000: 1 perfectly, but the panel did not come close to the promised color performance.
Coverage of the DCI-P3 space was limited to 95% instead of the promised 98%, which is acceptable, but gamma was 2.3 instead of 2.2, the white point was 7100K instead of 6500K, but worst of all was the color accuracy Reading I received a Delta-E of 2.31, which is outside the acceptable norm for professional color grading and, according to the accompanying report, is far from the promised value of 0.5. Normally I would reduce this to differences in the test equipment, but with such a large discrepancy I can hardly believe that this calibration was even performed.
And let's face it, a typical Delta-E across all of its tests of 0.59 is too good to be true anyway. The only monitor I've ever achieved this with is Acer's ConceptD CM2, which isn't a gaming monitor at all, despite the fact that LG's 27GN950 was terribly close. Nevertheless, our Spyder X Elite calibrated the display to acceptable standards within a few moments, refined the white point, the gamma performance and corrected the colors to a Delta-E of 1.46.
Niels Broekhuijsen / Digital Trends
That said, it's about more than just synthetic testing, and most players probably don't care that much about perfect color performance anyway. When I tested the LG 27GN950, I found that the left and right sides of the panel fell off in brightness near the edge, making it almost look like a piece of parchment that was still rolled up on each end. To my surprise, the Eve Spectrum showed no such phenomenon, and while it wasn't at all annoying on LG's panel, it looks much higher quality when the same panel is evenly illuminated to the edge.
Additionally, the amount of IPS glow and backlight bleeding from this IPS panel was also minimal – either this device was selected to be sent to me (although Eve claims not to do so on its website), or Eve has a trick his case for the monitor construction, which limits these effects better than LG. I kind of feel like it's the latter, but I don't believe it as I haven't seen any other units. That's not to say there aren't any, the lower left corner shows a little more sheen, but it's very acceptable.
Overall, the Eve Spectrum 4K I tested has one of the best IPS panel implementations I've seen, but I'm a little at a loss as to why I couldn't reproduce the color performance Eve tested. In any case, the performance is more than good enough for most use cases that I wouldn't pass the monitor on just based on the test results I had with my sample.
Niels Broekhuijsen / Digital Trends
The most important factor for gaming performance is the fast refresh rate of 144 Hz. 144 Hz is now the norm for gaming monitors, while there are monitors with 360 Hz in the upper range. You don't get that at 4K, of course, where you're limited by overclocking to 160 Hz at the highest end on LG's models with the same panel, and although this overclocking option isn't available on the Eve Spectrum, you can opt for a 240 Hz variant decide by falling on a QHD panel (2560 x 1440). However, other than extremely competitive gaming, I can't see a fall for anything over 144Hz.
But let's forget all of that for a second, turn on adaptive sync, turn on HDR, and start a few games with the graphics sliders all the way up. Here the Eve Spectrum shines in the truest sense of the word.
In HDR games, the Eve Spectrum 4K literally shines.
I didn't think I would like it that much, I thought the smaller 27 "panel would offer a lesser experience than my own 34" ultrawide despite the higher resolution, but boy, I was wrong. Playing at 4K for immersion is tremendous value, especially when playing games that have textures with the required resolution. I've played Mass Effect Legendary Edition, Horizon Zero Dawn, and even started Cyberpunk 2077 because it would be almost criminal not to do it. Long story short, the Eve Spectrum offered a level of resolution that was fun to play on, especially with immersive titles like these that have texture resolution to aid them. Coupled with 600 nits of HDR brightness, I could lose myself in game worlds for hours.
Of course, when it comes to competing titles like Insurgency Sandstorm, the Eve Spectrum 4K isn't lazy either, although it's important to keep in mind that it's a 4K monitor. While I had no problem playing the above story-based titles with higher visual fidelity and relying on Adaptive-Sync to keep things running smoothly, in this competitive online shooter I had to lower the graphics settings to get close the 144 Hz refresh rate to come – budget for a beefy graphics card if you're interested.
If you're looking for a proper 27-inch 4K gaming monitor, the Eve Spectrum is as good as possible. Priced at $ 799 and another $ 99 for the stand, it competes head-to-head with LG's best and offers some additional features, albeit with a bit more risk due to the company's history.
The Eve Spectrum may be well over a year late, but it's certainly not lacking in demand and it's still one of the best, if not the best, 4K gaming monitors money can buy. With HDMI 2.1, DisplayHDR600, 98% coverage of the DCI-P3 color space, a great IPS panel implementation and a mighty tidy design, the Eve Spectrum 4K is a display that many gamers can be itchy about.
The best alternative right now is 27GP950 from LG, which is the successor to the LG 27GN950 that we tested last year. All three are essentially identical monitors based on the same panel, except that LG's new version has HDMI 2.1. The LG panel also does 160Hz overclocking and comes with RGB, and it costs about the same when you include the kickstand.
This makes the Eve Spectrum a tough best seller, but if you're into the minimalist design, want the 100 watt power output, skip the booth, and want the customizability, the Spectrum 4K may have the edge.
Eve covers the Spectrum with a three-year warranty, including a 14-day DOA period and a pixel policy that states that the display must have no bright pixels and up to five dark pixels before a replacement is guaranteed. That being said, I don't see any reason why the Spectrum 4K shouldn't last at least five years like any monitor should, if properly cared for, do.
This is where Eva's reputation can come into play. The weight you place on the company's longevity and ability to deliver will no doubt put some off – and that's fair.
But just because of the quality of this brilliant monitor, the Eve Spectrum is absolutely worth buying.
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