I have always bought the top of the line consumer grade headsets available locally at either Future Shop or Staples as I have one of each very close to me. The price I generally pay for the “deluxe” sets is in the $50 range, or if they are out of stock I buy the mid-priced units.

In the last 3 years I have purchased at least 6 or 7 headsets from Logitech, and Plantronics and none of them have any lasting power at all. I have been lucky to get 6 months out of any of them before the inline mute/volume stops working or shorts out due to daily use. The worst part about the mute/volume switches is that they all look like they come from the same manufacturer, what I mean is that Plantronics and Logitech both appear to be buying their switches (if not the entire headset) from third party manufactures and they both do not appear to do any real life testing on the quality or lifespan of these switches.

To add insult to injury when you do have a problem it better be within a week of purchasing the unit so that (if you are lucky) the store you purchased it at will refund your money due to faulty product, otherwise if more than a few days have passed, you must deal with the manufacturer.

The warranty program that the manufacturers have in place does nothing but discourage Canadians from sending in anything for warranty service.

The headsets generally come with 1 or 2 year warranty, but to get service you would have to ship them to the USA, at your cost. Now this seems reasonable until you
a) check the shipping cost verses the purchasing cost, or
b) need to use the headset sometime in the next 6-12 weeks.

a) Shipping:
To ship back the set to the USA ** with the packaging as requested is in the $15-$20 range! Therefore the shipping cost is over 25-50% of the value of the $50 set, if you buy the lesser cost sets the shipping can be equal to the value. This is a rip off no question about it, especially when you consider that the headset will not be repaired but replaced, I doubt if they even would bother to test them as the cost to test them and repackage them is almost guaranteed to be higher than cost to the manufacturer. I would be willing to wager that they get counted and then sent to a land fill. So in my opinion the warranty is a fictitious one only there to look good and not provide any customer service at all.

b) Can’t wait for Months
The time required to service the headsets is not reasonable to me. I use the headsets every day, so being without them for a month or more is not an option.

Sooner or later I will bite the bullet and pay the hundreds of dollars required to by a “professional” headset for me, but what I worry about there is do you get 4 or 5 times the quality and lifespan with a $200 headset? My cynical self thinks that is not likely, but I’ll keep my eye out for a deal.

Currently I use a Logitech mid-price ($30) headset I found, it has only one speaker, and does not have an inline volume/mute, so I’m hoping for it to last for a year (I’m at about 3 months now). Overall this cheaper set seems OK except that the people I talk to say the quality and clarity is not what the deluxe sets provide and I have to almost eat the microphone to get a decent signal, but that is what I’m talking about. The Manufactures don’t seem to give a horse’s ass about quality or lifespan of their product as long as we keep buying it up.

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