Nacon is perhaps one of the most interesting companies in the gaming industry right now. It’s one of the only studios that serves as both a publisher of games and a purveyor of peripherals; as well as being responsible for games like GreedFall, Hell Is Us, and RoboCop: Rogue City, Nacon is also behind some of our favourite controllers, console accessories, and, yes, headsets.
All of which brings us to today’s subject: the RIG R5 Pro HS, a headset intended for use with PlayStation consoles. You can use this one with either the PS5 or the PS4, and it’s packing a pretty reasonable retail price as well, but is Nacon’s new set of headphones worth your money? Read on to find out.
No bells and whistles
Nacon has built itself a reputation for no-frills, straightforward accessories that offer quality at affordable prices, and the RIG R5 Pro HS (which bears the “HS” designation because it’s the PlayStation version of the headset) is certainly no exception on that front.
What you’re getting for your money here is a pretty simple prospect; it’s a black headset that bears Nacon’s RIG logo, as well as the PlayStation iconography (since this is an officially-licensed headset that has Sony’s backing). It comes complete with a flip-up microphone you can tuck away when it’s not in use (although you can’t detach it), as well as an inline volume control that will help you keep an eye on your game’s volume.
That’s all she wrote; there’s no wireless functionality here, and no USP to help the RIG R5 Pro HS stand out from an increasingly cutthroat and bloodthirsty crowd. Whether that’s an impressive degree of confidence on Nacon’s part or a misstep depends entirely on the sound quality, of course, which we’ll discuss in a moment.
What’s for sure is this: Nacon’s new headset isn’t for those who like their tech gadgets overly fancy and complicated. This is the kind of headset you buy if you need a no-nonsense wired solution that isn’t going to come with its own app for controlling equalisation or enabling any elaborate RGB lighting. It’s a headset with a microphone and a 3.5mm jack socket, and that’s largely all it is.
Crystal clear
Happily, since the RIG R5 Pro HS has to trade largely on its sound quality, Nacon has done a great job with engineering the sound for this headset.
Everything came through crystal-clear for us; we were able to hear important game sounds like footsteps, gunshots, and team calls very well indeed. Nacon says it’s tuned the sound specifically to emphasise the headphones’ upper-mid-range frequency, which is a pretty common trick for gaming headsets, and we think it’s paid off in spades.
Nacon’s new headset also bears a rather intriguing little quirk in the form of the volume slider; you can slide it most of the way up for modular control over the volume of your game or audio, but once you reach what you think is the maximum volume, there’s a click mechanism that allows you to add a boost.
We weren’t entirely sure why this was in place, but it did mean that we weren’t surprised by sudden explosions of audio, so if it’s some kind of safety feature or ear protection protocol, then it’s welcome. It’s not entirely clear why the volume slider doesn’t just pass through its full range of motion and control volume that way, but it’s far from a deal-breaker; just something that makes the RIG R5 Pro HS a unique prospect.
The microphone, too, is a pretty high-quality one. Nacon promises “crystal-clear voice chat” from the mic, and we had no trouble getting our teammates to hear us while gaming online; they reported that our voice came through clearly in their own headsets, so we don’t have any complaints on that front. It’s not likely to rival the quality of a dedicated condenser mic, but that’s not the point.
Rather handily, flipping the microphone upwards also mutes it, so if you need to nip off for a quick drink or a bathroom break during a particularly intense session of Battlefield 6 (we won’t judge you!), then you can just move the mic upwards 90 degrees and set your headset down. Once you return, just flip the mic back down and you’re ready to go.
We can’t quite explain why, but we’re big fans of this mechanism. Somehow, it feels just a little cooler and more stylish than a dedicated mute button, even if that might be easier to work out at first glance. Switching the mic upwards and then back down again when we were ready to talk made us feel like secret agents, and we’ll give extra points to any headset that can achieve that.
Simplicity itself
You’re likely going to be disappointed if you’re expecting something more complex from the Nacon RIG R5 Pro HS. This is a no-frills wired headset that plugs into the jack socket on your DualSense or DualShock 4; it doesn’t have any wireless functionality.
It does, however, support devices beyond the ones listed by Nacon. Since it just uses a 3.5mm socket to connect, you can likely use this on pretty much anything that has the corresponding port; Nacon says it’s PC- and mobile-ready, but we can’t see any reason it wouldn’t also work on a Switch, for example, or an Xbox (although we weren’t able to test it on any of these devices). Just be aware that the device is intended for use with PlayStation, PC, and mobile.
The Nacon RIG R5 Pro HS is a comfortable, high-quality headset that won’t break the bank and won’t shatter any records for most complicated or elaborately-constructed audio device. It isn’t going to wow anyone as a conversation piece, but it’s a rock-solid piece of kit with great sound and a good-quality microphone, and you can wear it for prolonged periods of time while you’re gaming. Who could ask for more than that?
