Review: AceZone A-Rise

Esports tournaments are a very interesting space for audio. Communities are fascinated by how players on stage can hear each other perfectly while being isolated from crowd noise and the advantages good audio might bring. While some tournaments (like The International) turn to noise-isolating boxes for teams, others rely on headsets and microphones.

AceZone, a small Danish audio brand, is one of the premier players on the world stage when it comes to audio despite not being as famous as some of its competitors, such as Razer or Logitech. Today, we take a look at the AceZone A-Rise, the model at the very top of the AceZone consumer lineup and one of the best gaming headsets around.

The A-Rise is, for all intents and purposes, a professional product aimed at the highest level of competition. Similar to a street-legal race car, it has all the features needed for competition stages but is packaged for customers who want the same experience at home. This means some compromises will be made to provide the best sound and isolation, but we’ll get to those. A new Porsche GT3 RS will not have the most comfortable seats for long drives but will make up for it on the track — this analogy fits very well for this headset.

AceZone provides headsets for several tournament operators worldwide, such as PGL, which uses the A-Live model. The A-Rise takes most of the features from it — such as impressive passive and active noise cancelling and an extremely isolated microphone — and puts them in a premium package that looks and feels sturdy and solid. Design-wise, there’s a lot of metal and strong plastic, subtle lighting and an overall feeling of having something that will survive years of drops. The headset ships with a hard case for carrying and an assortment of cables to facilitate connections and charging.

This A-Rise costs around £630 through the AceZone website, making it one of the most expensive gaming headsets you can put on your head, excluding offerings from high-end audio brands such as Audeze. It is not aimed at the mass market and casual gamers. Luckily, AceZone produces the A-Spire, a headset that is half the price of the A-Rise but made with the same attention to detail and overall approach. The A-Rise is, however, handmade in Denmark, while the A-Spire isn’t.

The design is typically subdued, with large ear cups attached to the headband by thick metal rails that provide exceptional clamping force on your head. The headset features a subtle AceZone glowing logo, USB-C and 3.5mm jacks, power, menu and music control buttons, as well as removable earpads. Moreover, the product has a non-removable microphone that mutes automatically when lifted. The headset won a Red Dot Design Award for its industrial and practical design but is not as visually appealing as offerings from the likes of SteelSeries, Razer or Logitech/Astro.

As for connectivity, you can connect it wirelessly and with any USB-C and 3.5mm cable, making it easy to use on all platforms, from mobile phones to PlayStation, Xbox and PC. It should be noted that a wired connection is the way to go when playing games on PCs and consoles, and Bluetooth should only be used for mobile gaming and music.

Having worn countless headsets, the A-Rise is a different beast altogether in many ways. 

The first thing is the weight: the headset weighs 550g, and you will feel every gram on your head. The second thing is the clamping force. The A-Rise presses down on your ears with impressive force and provides exceptional passive noise cancelling — so much so that I got startled by my dog several times due to not hearing her walk around the apartment. The clamping force also makes the A-Rise tough on you if you have a larger head and wear glasses. It was hard for me to keep the headset on for more than an hour because it pressed hard on my ears. The passive noise cancellation is impressive, but paired with the ridiculously overpowered ANC, the headset makes you feel disconnected from the world in seconds.

AceZone designed the A-Rise to be a no-compromise tournament-ready headset, and it certainly has delivered. The microphone mutes automatically when lifted and is not detachable, but it features some more technology that makes your voice stand out regardless of where you are located — in a quiet room or outside; there really is no difference to those listening to your voice, but this still isn’t a studio microphone. It is created to isolate your voice but will never be as good as a real microphone in terms of overall recording quality.

You really do feel like you can simply take this headset out of its box in an esports tournament and just plug it in and play without worrying about anything.

A very interesting thing about the A-Rise is that it is controlled by a mobile app rather than software installed on the device. This is a brilliant idea because it allows users to save settings in the app and change them on the go, rather than installing software on a PC just to modify their equaliser (EQ) settings. Because the headset ‘talks’ to the phone app, you can change EQ settings between games or customise everything without leaving a match. A big bonus is that the app does not require an account or sign-in — you just need to add a headset and you’re ready to go.

The app is straightforward and I had no issues connecting the headset to my phone. It provides access to several modes, including a pro gaming mode that aggressively mutes background noise from the microphone and dials the Active Noise Cancelling (ANC) up. However, there is also a more relaxed music and casual gaming mode that also allows for tuning of the two-band EQ, sidetone (the amount of your voice captured by the microphone and played through the headset) and transparency (amount of sound allowed through by the ANC). Overall, it was a good experience and something others could learn from. The lack of software also means that the headset can be easily connected to any platform and be customised rather than limited in scope when connected to a Nintendo Switch or a PlayStation. You get all of the features all of the time, and if you don’t want to connect to the app — you really don’t have to. The headset is more than capable even if you don’t decide to tweak anything in-app.

Although the AceZone team told Esports Insider that the headset shines the most when used in games, I would also like to commend the overall sound quality of the headset in the music mode. In contrast to many other ‘gaming’ headsets on the market, the A-Rise is very neutral, reminiscent of more audiophile-grade equipment than gaming headsets. I tried the headset with several different genres and styles during my testing. For example, the acoustic guitars and strings in Nathaniel Ratecliff’s Center of Me sounded exceptionally clear and well-layered, while some other, more guitar-heavy music, such as Ghost’s live album Rite Here Rite Now, provided new levels of detail. This has much to do with the ANC technology AceZone created, allowing the headset to do its best at mid-volume and providing a capsule-like experience. There was never a need to crank it all the way up, regardless of the use case.

The funny thing is, despite this being a high-end gaming headset, I enjoyed using it to listen to music much more than my usual pair. The A-Rise is good at accurately playing music because it is tuned to be optimised for mid-range sounds (like in-game footsteps), which are coincidentally the ranges that most high-end headphones aim to reproduce the best. I also had the luck of having construction done next door for a couple of days, and the headset isolated all drilling and smashing noises with absolutely no trouble. 

In the game, I can’t say that the A-Rise made me a better player (other reviews swear by it, however), but its pro gaming mode strongly emphasises the sounds you need when playing. Footsteps in CS2 and VALORANT are very detailed and more prominent. AceZone says that their tech allows players to hear footsteps in games sooner. While I can not entirely prove it scientifically, the headset’s passive and active ANC eliminates every possible sound but the ones you need. If someone shoots across the map in CS2, you can hear it loud and clear — surprisingly loud, actually. I think there’s also a major subconscious effort here — being so isolated from any outside noise makes you focus on sounds in the game better, and the lack of distractions helps recondition your brain to focus on the game more. Once you take it off, however, you will feel a bit confused for a second or two before you get used to the real world again.

I used the A-Rise in other, more relaxed games as well, and the headset performed as expected. I was pleasantly surprised by how it handled ambient, background and car sounds in the likes of Assetto Corsa and Forza Horizon 5, despite the latter not having very impressive engine sounds to begin with.

Due to its design, the A-Rise performs best in noisy environments, such as stages or other LAN situations. At home, the headset will also be exceptional, but it might be too much if you live in a quiet area and do not regularly deal with loud background noise. Noisy neighbours, cars, planes, horns, and loud music will never bother you again if you use the A-Rise — that I can promise.

Overall, the A-Rise is an exceptional piece of technology and hardware despite being aimed at a very niche end of an already niche market. If you are willing to pay the price, there probably isn’t anything on the market that matches it for sheer performance in-game. Competitors might come close with passive noise cancellation, design or connectivity, but no one offers all of the features this headset offers in one package. AceZone went all-out to create the best possible headset for competitive gaming, and it feels like the company came extremely close.