transportability. The plastic casing is definitely stronger and more resilient than its predecessor's and the reduced size of all of the product's components make the Mk II's easy to pack and transport with ease. The new padding material and pleather covering are comfortable, but not perfect. Memory foam is soft and form fitting, however, it does not breath as much as comparable materials, making this element of the Mk II's design a bit of a trade off. On the one hand, memory foam is snug and adds improved filtering of environmental noise, but your ears will be quick to heat up in the headset. To make matters worse, the enclosure around your ears is relatively small. While more than enough to accommodate average ear sizes, there is very little wriggle room.





On the sound performance side of things, the Mk II's 40mm Neodymium drivers, which feature complete 20Hz to 20kHz response are very impressing. The Fatal1ty Professional Series Mk II headset dominates just about any type of source audio, music, gaming, or otherwise. The native equalization of the headset gives users impressive, but not overbearing, bass response with smooth mids and crisp highs. The Mk II's are stereo not 5.1, but the sound is surprisingly roomy and localizes in-game effects accurately.

Creative's big marketing push for the Mk II's is it's Silencer feature, which intelligently filters ambient and environmental effects through voice communications...but only if you have Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium sound card. The Silencer works through the use of two microphones built into the removable boom mic -- one on the tip, another on the ear cup joint. The X-Fi Titanium sound card then takes the two signals, identifies the background noise, and filters it out of the outgoing audio signal, reducing the outside noise for those you are communicating with. Creative was kind enough to provide us with two headsets and two X-Fi Titanium cards, and we won't deny it, the difference was clear. Much of IGN's in-office shenanigans were filtered out as we communicated from two opposing areas of the building. Still, this experience will be exclusively limited to those with the Fatal1ty/X-Fi Titanium combo, everyone else using the headset will output standard voice communications.