One of my favourite headsets for Skype and similar applications is the Plantronics Audio 478 Headset, I've had my original pair for 2 years and I just bought another.
This headset is completely portable coming in its own travel bag, portable it may be but its durable enough to sit on your desk and be used as a main headset for your desktop computer. The headset is a stereo type with quite good sound for the money but certainly not audiophile sound as one would find with something like the Grado SR60I headphones but quite acceptable for Skype and everyday listening. The Audio 478 headset is an on the ear type thus you can hear what's going on around you. The headset employs DSP technology for noise cancelation and signal processing. The microphone of the Audio 478 rotates downwards from the left and can be adjusted once lowered. For a headset of this price the microphone sounds very nice and doesn't exhibit the quality of talking through your nose type sound that some microphones do on these sorts of headsets, I had terrible trouble with a logitech pair in this regard. An inline control panel provides volume, mute and answer/hangup buttons, these buttons can be manipulated through the Plantronics Audio 478 control panel which is a downloadable add-in to Windows, you can customise what the buttons do, a plugin is also available for Skype to allow Skype to take advantage of the answer/hangup capabilities of the Audio 478. The headset is a USB type and the cable is fairly rugged, again a great plus for this headset over the older Logitech pair I owned whose cable started curling and perishing after a very short period of time. The Plantronics Audio 478 in my view is very reasonably priced, I paid $65.00 for my new pair and $70.00 2 years ago when I bought my original pair so the price hasn't changed all that much. The price I paid is in Australia dollars so people living in the U.S. will probably pay quite a bit less. ********** Dane Trethowan Skype: grtdane12 Phone US (213) 438-9741 Phone U.K. 01245 79 0598 Phone Australia (03) 9005 8589 Mobile: +61400494862 Fax +61397437954
