A good, easy to travel with gaming headset is something folks who use a gaming laptop are probably interested in. An in-ear headset with a detachable boom microphone sounds great, especially when it also costs less than $25.
The Maxin G30 is very much a headset of two halves, meaning there are plenty of points to like about it, but one big elephant in the room.
$23.99Bottom line: It's a decent, affordable option for on-the-go gamers but the microphone is rubbish.
Pros:
Great to travel with.Removable microphone.Tangle-free cableCase included.Cons:
Microphone may not work with Xbox One.Microphone quality is poor.What you'll love about the Maxin G30
Gaming headsets can be pretty large, and whatever bag or case you have, leaving the house with them can be a chore. Not so here, since for the most part, this is just an affordable pair of in-ear headphones. But you have a little microphone arm you can attach and turn it into a proper gaming headset.
That the microphone detaches is one of the best features, since the headphones themselves sound decent. For less than $25, the sound quality is certainly serviceable. There's no proper noise cancellation, but with the different sized tips on offer, you can get a good seal in your ear and a solid amount of passive noise isolation so you can focus on the game.
The G30 is designed like sports headphones, so each earbud hooks into the top part of your ear. The cable is flat, long and tangle-free, and there's even an extension to make it longer, as well as a splitter cable for using with the individual microphone and headphone ports on a PC.
The inline remote is excellent if a little large. It has the mute control for the microphone as well as a volume slider and a dedicated call answering button if you're hooked up to your smartphone.
The microphone is the perfect length when attached and sits just beside your mouth. The entire thing can be contorted to your desire and it supposedly has noise cancellation so the folks in your party chat can't hear everything else going on around you. It works to some degree, but the overall quality of the microphone is something else entirely.
What you'll hate about the Maxin G30
The microphone is rubbish. Yes, it detaches and has an element of noise canceling but the overall sound quality isn't good.
If all you're going to use it for is party chat, it's serviceable and at least clear, but if you're thinking of using it to stream with or create any kind of content, walk away.
What's also not so hot is that it doesn't necessarily work with the Xbox One even though the documentation says it should. When I tried to use party chat while it was hooked up to the controller no one in the party could hear me.
On PC using the splitter cable, it works fine. It just doesn't sound very good.
Bottom line on the Maxin G30
I wanted to really like this product because for traveling with a gaming laptop it seems like a great idea. It's portable enough to fit in a pocket yet still offers the benefits of a proper gaming headset.
The headphone portion is pretty good, especially for its sub-$25 price point. The sound isn't anything to shout from the rooftops about, but it's detailed, has good volume and with a reasonable amount of passive noise isolation.
The microphone lets the G30 down. I'm not 100 percent sure if it's any better than just using the built-in laptop microphone, aside from the noise cancellation which seems to have some positive effect.
It's a neat idea and probably just needs a better-known brand to put some effort into it. If you only need to be able to party chat, it'll probably be fine. But anything creative like streaming, and you won't want an audience hearing what you sound like from this.
