XBOX Headset vs. RB Mic

[ThreePieceSuit]

So when I sing at home, I use my Xbox Live Headset and I had been getting frustrated for a while because I could only 3 or 4 star the songs on hard. I thought it was me. However last night I went to a friend's to play Rock Band and he has the RB handheld mic. With that I 5-starred the Hard songs and was even able to go into Expert. I was just wondering if anyway else can verify that the RB mic works better than the headset. It could've also been the fact that his TV is huge compared to mine and that it made the bars look thicker, but I doubt it.

[Nate Finch]

The headset is not made for singing, it's made for talking. I'm sure it has a much smaller volume range as well as poorer quality pickup. I'm not really surprised at all.

[shaja]

With my 360 headseat, the audio lag is much greater than with the RB mic.

With the headset, it sounds like almost half a second between the mic input signal and the output over the system speakers (hooked up via analog connection, so no extra delay introduced there). I have to keep mic volume turned down in vocal options when playing to avoid messing up my timing.

With the RB mic, there is a perceptible delay between input and output, but it is much smaller - I'd guess 20-60ms.

The length of the processing delay has some obvious implications for pitch-tracking accuracy when you're playing a song where the vocal melody jumps around quickly and often, even when your actual singing pitch is on target.

[logicalnoise]

for a while HMX wasn't committing to supportting the headset. They said explicitly that it just didn't have the frequency range that their usb mic would have. But eventually they bowed to requests to support it. I've never tried it because I like holding the mic and I own a mix stand if I ever want to try doing dual instruments.

[SpikeX]

The headset wasn't made for singing, so quite obviously the mic that the same company made FOR SINGING is going to work better than a 3rd party chat headset.