Turtle Beach Atlas Air Review: Feels like air, but sounds better

You might be surprised to learn that while I love a good gaming headset, I almost never wear one unless I absolutely must — I prefer to listen to everything over speakers instead. Headsets, especially gaming headsets, are designed to fully immerse you in your own little pocket of pure, isolated sound, and it's a little too isolated for me — I'm easily distracted and it's just too much sound. Or, maybe, too focused. 

What I do like, however, are open-back headsets, which have wider, more open soundstages and offer immersion without the isolation. There are several open-back gaming headsets on the market, but almost all are wired. Enter Turtle Beach's newest premium headset and the first wireless open-back gaming headset, the Atlas Air. The Atlas Air is a lightweight, airy open-back wireless headset with 40mm dynamic drivers and support for 24-bit audio. It offers 2.4GHz wireless, Bluetooth 5.2, and wired connectivity, and it comes with a detachable flip-to-mute boom mic. It's the kind of headset I could wear forever... if it didn't suffer from a serious software problem. And software is kind of a big deal for a wireless headset.

The Atlas Air is available now for $179.99.

Design and Comfort of the Atlas Air

The Atlas Air is a wireless, over-ear, open-back gaming headset with a detachable flip-to-mute boom mic. It has a lightweight gray plastic frame with shiny gray speaker plates on its large, round floating earcups (we'll get to the "floating" part in a moment). It comes with a black mesh and elastic suspension headband and black fabric-covered earpads, but Turtle Beach sells brightly-colored "mod packs," consisting of a replacement headband strap and earpads, for $25. Turtle Beach is printed in silver above each earcup, and its palm tree logo is embossed in silver on each side of the strap, where it attaches to the headband.

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The Atlas Air is well-named — it's incredibly lightweight at just 10.61 ounces (301g) with the microphone installed (10.32oz / 292.5g without the mic). It's not the absolute lightest gaming headset on the market, but it's pretty close — and combined with its mesh suspension headband, it really felt like I was wearing nothing on my head.

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The headband uses a combination of mesh and an adjustable elastic strap to "float" away from your head. The mesh wraps around the plastic frame to hold the elastic strap in place, and the elastic strap is anchored to each side, fastened to the inside of the frame with Velcro. You can adjust the headband by adjusting the strap to make it tighter or looser. It's not particularly precise, but there's a lot of leeway because the elastic is stretchy and the frame is pretty flexible. The inside of the headband measures 12.5 inches (317.5mm), and the strap is the only means of adjustment — the earcups don't move or extend like they do in other headsets. While I found the Atlas Air to be very comfortable, my husband, who has a bigger head than I do, didn't like the way the elastic strap pressed down on his head, even after he adjusted it to be much looser.

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The earcups are also "floating," in that they’re attached to the frame with rubber bungees, sort of like what you see on a microphone shock mount. This allows for a decent amount of movement in all directions, so the Atlas Air adapts to different head shapes pretty easily. The earcups have soft, memory foam padded earpads, covered in a shiny, athletic weave fabric. The padding is thick but very soft, and shouldn't be a problem even for people wearing glasses. The fabric is fine — my ears didn't get hot, but they don't usually get hot (they didn't feel particularly cool, either), and I wasn't too concerned about passive noise cancellation as this is an open-back headset. The fabric does look a little cheap, however. 

Actually, the whole headset looks a little cheap. I realize this is partly the sacrifice you make for a headset that's so lightweight — the 8.3 ounce (235g) SteelSeries Arctis Nova 1 is also made of plastic, elastic, and mesh — but the Atlas Air is still a $180 headset. The thin, ultra-flexible plastic headband doesn't feel particularly flimsy — in fact, it feels fairly sturdy for what it is — but it doesn't feel like a headset you could easily toss into a bag (the earcups don't swivel and it's an open-back headset, so it's not too travel-friendly anyway). The HyperX Cloud III Wireless, which is also incredibly comfortable and retails for $10 less than the Atlas Air, has a full metal frame and weighs 11.64 ounces (330g) without its mic installed — about 1.3 ounces (37.5g) heavier than the Atlas Air.

The Atlas Air is more than just its looks and weight, of course, but just know that it's not a particularly premium-looking headset. Even the tonal color scheme isn't working for me — the entire frame is a generic dark gray plastic, save for the shiny (but still plastic) speaker plates, and the black accents aren't enough to give it that premium boost. I do like the bold, vibrant colors of the mod packs, which come in royal purple, "rebel pink," and "bermuda blue," but adding color won't make the headset look more premium (just more colorful). Plus, it feels like Turtle Beach could've included an extra set of earpads in the box — perhaps in an alternate color.

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The left earcup houses the headset's buttons, ports, and controls. There are three buttons: power, input switch (for quickly switching between 2.4GHz wireless and Bluetooth), and a multi-function button (tap to play/pause, double-tap to skip forward, triple-tap to skip backward, and hold to enter Bluetooth pairing mode). The speaker plate on the left earcup twists to control volume, and the headset comes with a 3.5mm audio cable with a volume wheel. There are also three ports on the left earcup: a USB-C port for charging, a 3.5mm jack for a wired connection, and a 2.5mm port for connecting the headset's detachable boom mic. Once the mic is attached you can flip it up to mute it, so there's no mute button on the headset.

The Atlas Air comes with two cables — a 6-foot (1.8m) braided USB-C to USB-A charging cable, and a 6-foot (1.8m) braided 3.5mm audio cable with inline volume controls. It also comes with a detachable boom mic and a foam pop filter, a 2.4GHz wireless USB-A dongle, and a soft cloth drawstring carrying pouch.

Specs

Audio Performance of the Atlas Air

The Atlas Air features an open-back design and has 40mm "high-precision" dynamic drivers that support 24-bit (hi-fi) / 96 kHz audio (in PC mode) and have a frequency response rate of 20 - 40,000 Hz. The open-back design means there's sound leak on both sides — you'll hear what's happening around you, and those around you will hear what you're listening to — but it also means a wider soundstage and a more open and natural (yet still immersive) sound profile in general. There are several open-back gaming headsets on the market — we last tested the Corsair Virtuoso Pro — but Turtle Beach touts the Atlas Air as the first wireless open-back gaming headset.

Music sounds very good on the Atlas Air. I won't lie — I was prepared for disappointment, but I was very pleasantly surprised. The headset has a mostly-balanced sound profile that trends a little toward the low-end, but I don't hate that. There's enough power in the low end that you'll just feel the bass in songs like Kaskade's POW POW POW,  but not so much that there's any muddying. The low mid-range also has a little oomph in my mid-heavy favorite, K-391's Lonely World, but just a little. The highs, on the other hand, are slightly restrained (but still a little hissy, occasionally). But combined with the headset's open-back design, which allows for a nice, wide soundstage and plenty of airiness, I definitely enjoyed listening to music on the Atlas Air.

Games also sound great on the Atlas Air — though, with the headset's open-back design, it's better for games with richly layered, immersive environments and isn't quite as good for first-person shooters or competitive battle royales. The alien ocean in the Subnautica series and the jungles in Uncharted 4 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider sounded fantastic through this headset — with all the layering and detail you hear in a closed-back gaming headset, plus the openness of a wider, less processed soundstage. While the wider soundstage did mean I could hear footsteps and gunshots in games like Hunt: Showdown  (yes, I was on a 2018 nostalgia trip this weekend), the sounds were definitely less focused than what you'll hear in a closed-back headset — accurate, but harder to isolate and concentrate on.

Unsurprisingly, I did get a better, more accurate response from the Atlas Air's drivers when I turned it off and plugged it into a DAC (the DragonFly Cobalt), but the headset performed well over 2.4GHz wireless — for the most part. I had some trouble with the software thwarting the headset's wireless performance by switching settings at random and resetting things, but the wired performance remained consistent. (I was able to mostly resolve the software issue by uninstalling the app, but it's still a little shaky.)

Microphone of the Atlas Air

The Atlas Air has a detachable boom mic that also manages to implement my favorite Turtle Beach standby — flip-to-mute. It's not, however, a great implementation — the mic attaches to a movable piece inside the headset so you can flip it up and down, but it's not very easy to do so because the mic's bendable gooseneck arm is... too bendy. Also, if the mic is bent toward your mouth while you're using it, flipping it up without bending it out of the way means it hits you in the face. (Yes, I know this is an issue with any flip-up mic that also bends, but for some reason I ended up hitting myself more with this mic.)

Flipping it up does mute it though, and it also plays a tone (which you can adjust/turn off in the Swarm II software) to let you know when you're muted. If there's one thing Turtle Beach does very well, it's make sure you know the mute status of your microphone — and I'm not being facetious; I'm pretty paranoid about mic status, especially with wireless headsets. The next-best way to mute is to have a removable boom mic that you can rip out, just to be sure. (This actually isn't really an option with the Atlas Air, however — the boom mic is detachable but it takes some wiggling and finesse to detach it.)

Muting mechanics aside, the Atlas Air's mic is pretty standard for a gaming headset mic — it will work well enough for chatting with teammates, friends, and coworkers, but it won't make you sound great. I initially had some issues where my voice sounded very over-processed and a lot of my words were getting cut off (usually the result of aggressive noise gate), But once I managed to turn off the noise gate in the software — which was more difficult than it should've been, more on that in the software section — and disable audio enhancements in Windows' sound settings, my voice sounded less processed. It still didn't sound good, but people were able to hear me and understand what I was saying. With no processing, the mic did pick up more pops and hisses, but it wasn't too bad — people could still understand me without issue. 

The Atlas Air's mic will work in a pinch, but I would pick up a solid, standalone USB mic — like the $60 Logitech Yeti Orb — to use as a primary mic with this headset.

Features and Software of the Atlas Air

The Atlas Air works with Turtle Beach's Swarm II peripheral software. And, like most Turtle Beach headsets, when I first plugged in the headset and dongle I was immediately prompted to update the firmware, which then proceeded to "fail" several times until I restarted everything twice, out of frustration. Then it was suddenly magically fine. I wasn't a fan of the Swarm software when it was under Roccat, nor was I a fan of Turtle Beach's various disjointed firmware update apps, and it seems that merging everything into one app — Swarm II — has not improved the situation.

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But first, let's go over what Swarm II is designed for. Swarm II lets you access a handful of audio and microphone settings, such as the master volume, game/chat mix, and mic sensitivity, monitoring, and noise gate. It also has a 10-band EQ for both the audio and the mic, and has some general settings (auto shut-off, voice/tone prompt volume, LED brightness), and lets you easily (ish) check to see if the firmware and drivers are up-to-date. Any changes you make in the software will (hopefully) save to the device immediately, and the Atlas Air has onboard storage with room for up to five profiles. You can create custom EQ presets for the audio but not for the mic (though this seems like it may be added in the future).

Now, this would all be fine — if it worked. But the software is very finicky and inconsistent. I know I say that about every piece of peripheral software, but this is even more finicky, and less consistent, than most. Sometimes my settings were immediately saved to the headset and implemented; sometimes they weren't. I frequently found the settings changed when I restarted something or turned off the headset, or switched back from a different device, or accidentally clicked on the app, etc. I finally just uninstalled the software and things seem to be working fine. I couldn't avoid the software completely, however, as the headset wouldn't pair with its wireless dongle without an initial firmware update.

Battery Life and Wireless Performance of the Atlas Air

Turtle Beach rates the Atlas Air's battery life at 50 hours — enough that you'll only need to charge it once a week or so. There are plenty of headsets, now, that last longer — the Razer BlackShark V2 Pro (2023) hits 70 hours easily, while the HyperX Cloud III is rated for 120 hours. But 50 hours is plenty for a wireless gaming headset you're not going to travel or commute with. As for connectivity, the Atlas Air has 2.4GHz wireless, Bluetooth 5.2, and wired options. It doesn't offer simultaneous 2.4GHz wireless and Bluetooth 5.2, but the input button is easy to find and input switching is very quick — I'd rather have that than a simultaneous dual connection that keeps dropping.

Speaking of buttons, the buttons on the Atlas Air might seem like overkill (as many headsets combine functions like power and Bluetooth pairing), but I was impressed: I didn't have to fumble around to find them, nor did I forget which was which — not once. The speaker plate volume wheel, on the other hand, was a mess. It was inconsistent in just about every way — sometimes turning it one notch would raise the volume by a small increment and the next notch would jump to maximum... and the next notch would lower it. Sometimes turning the wheel would just jump the volume between a couple of steps before ultimately doing nothing. For what it's worth, this is something that could almost certainly be fixed with a firmware update (and was most likely broken by a firmware update). However, I would rather adjust my volume elsewhere than deal with Swarm II.

Bottom Line

I kind of love this headset — it's super comfortable, it sounds great, and the open-back design is perfect. But I also kind of hate this headset — or, at least, the firmware/software side of it. So, I'm at a crossroads: the headset has some issues that probably need to be fixed with a firmware update, but the software is so bad that I'm not even confident a firmware update would work (or fix things — more likely, we're going to need several firmware updates). It might sound a little dramatic to let terrible software stop you from buying a headset — something that really shouldn't even need software, but, trust me... it's bad. And firmware/software issues are more important with a wireless headset; this headset seems like it'll work fine if you only use it in analog mode, but then why buy a wireless headset?

On the hardware side, the Atlas Air is fantastic, and the good thing about software (and firmware) is that it can be updated — so there's hope. But you probably want a headset for now, not sometime (hopefully) in the future. The Atlas Air is the only wireless open-back gaming headset, but if you're looking for hours of comfort, you'll find it in the HyperX Cloud III or the Razer BlackShark V2 Pro (2023). As for open-back, Corsair's Virtuoso Pro is similarly priced (currently on sale for $150; normally $200) but a little less fun, sound-profile-wise, and Audeze's LCD-GX sounds incredible but is a little less fun... price-wise ($899).

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