Thrustmaster T.Racing Scuderia Ferrari Edition-DTS Review

The Thrustmaster T.Racing Scuderia Ferrari Edition-DTS headset is rather striking on initial appearance, given it’s official “Rosso Corsa” colour scheme, taken straight from Ferrari’s branding books. It’s an official tie in too, hence the somewhat lengthy name that this headset has been given. Out of the box, you get the headset, the boom microphone, a stub to block the microphone port when not in use, a cable that works both as an extension and a splitter, to allow you to plug into devices that have a split microphone and headphone jack. There’s also a brief manual, and a code to give you a year’s access to DTS HeadPhone:X, giving you virtualized 3D positional audio in the headset.

The headset utilises a set of 50mm drivers, allowing it to pour audio into your ear holes without distortion. There’s also a volume control on the left earcup, and an inline control for the microphone portion, allowing you to set the volume of, and muting your microphone without needing to make any changes in software. The microphone is decidedly chunky, and the whole unit comes together to replicate the style of a headset that you’d see on the members of Ferrari’s pit crews.

On your head, one of the first things you’ll likely notice is that the memory foam earpads are very comfortable, and they stay comfortable on your head for multiple hours - which is great for those longer endurance races, though there doesn’t appear to be any weaker memory foam along the top of the ear for those wearing glasses, the foam should mould around the arms of glasses fine, but may push them into your head a little more than you may be comfortable with.

The sound they produce when playing games has great stereo separation, and the virtualisation aspect of DTS Headphone:X works a treat but depending on content can present slightly muddy. This was much more prevalent in listening to music or content with voices such as watching Netflix, though racing games fair well as it accentuates the tone of the engine more, which fits the demographic of this headset more. If you plan on using this headset for both, I recommend a 3-4db cut at 700Hz, and a small boost of 2-3db on 6000Hz and up, at least when you’re not gaming. The microphone also seems similarly nuanced in terms of audio quality, having a slight mid-range punch that left the sound clear enough to be understandable, but it gives it a slightly weird vibe of being broadcast over a radio frequency, despite that not being the case.

Overall, the Thrustmaster T.Racing Scuderia Ferrari Edition-DTS is a very comfortable headset to use for long periods of time, and the DTS positional audio features can certainly heighten the immersion factor when it comes to gaming, it’s just a shame that the code in the box is only for one year of access, but this is more DTS’ problem than Thrustmaster. It certainly looks the part in its bright red Rosso Corsa colour scheme, but is marred by the overbearing mid-range that they deliver when not gaming, and the quality of the audio from the microphone almost feeling artificially compressed to get that sound of a pit crew headset.

As for their statement of “a major boost to achieve your best race times”, at least for me, I’ve a feeling there’s other factors at play keeping me from achieving those...