Not a bad little headset this. Trust's latest mixes in headphones, a microphone and a 5.1-channel surround sound effect direct to your ears. And it manages to do it all really rather well.

That said, we've never really been fully convinced by 5.1 headphones, finding them strong at creating some form of surround sound direct to your ears, yet never coming close to matching the genuine effect of a proper, standalone set of 5.1 speakers.

These Trust headphones don't either, although once again you'd be hard pushed to argue with the surround effect they do manage to generate. Our ears were treated to lively audio with a useful bass, certainly in excess of what we were initially expecting.

They're not too bad to wear either, and bearing in mind that the photo makes them look quite cumbersome, we found them surprisingly comfortable. We wouldn't be too happy wearing them for hours on end, but they do the job for the odd gaming session, and we just about managed to get to the end of a couple of test DVDs. It's a hard life we have.

Even the built-in microphone works quite well. It's no market leader by any means, but for a bit of VoIP and the occasional speech recognition work, we found it quite capable.

The complete headset hooks up to your PC via a USB port, and it's fully plug and play compatible. Indeed, we were up and using the headset in less than a minute, without the need to install any software whatsoever. In the end, we did investigate the extra disc that Trust throws into the box, and found that it featured software to help you tailor the audio output, replete with those oh-so-necessary slider settings to play around with.

Granted, we suspect that many people will bypass all of these settings, but we had some luck in slightly improving the audio output we got after a little bit of tweaking. Incidentally, you can control the overall volume thanks to a simple controller built onto the cable you use to connect the headset to your PC. You'll find a subwoofer and mute control mounted onto the cable, too.

With support for the key surround sound technologies and all-round good performance from the headset, we found ourselves warming to Trust's latest. Long term, we wonder if it's destined to be best used in short bursts, and if you're looking for something for more prolonged use then it may be worth shelling out a little more. But we were quite happy with the HS-6200 set and will continue to use it.