The surround sound headset has turned out to be quite a trend. From the humungous monstrosities of several years ago (with price tags to match), we're now being treated to more modest monstrosities that leave change from £50.

TerraTec's Headset Master 5.1 is one of the better examples of the breed, although it does display the bulkiness that's required to house the technology around your ears. It's still smaller than a good many similar headsets we've tested, but anyone seeking the discretion of iPod-esque earphones is in for quite a surprise.

Along with other products of its ilk, it has a control box on the headphone cord and this is a stylish little beast that allows you to individually control the output through each channel. You can mute the sound at the push of a button, too, and finding a suitable arrangement to entertain our ears was fairly straightforward.

In fact the whole setup process of the Headset Master 5.1 was straightforward. Granted, you can simply plug the USB lead into your PC with scant regard for the included software, and you'll find it recognised and working with little delay. But it's worth installing the application, which allows you to fine tune the audio, again with little trouble.

So far so good, then. And so we tested the headset with a mixture of gaming, movies and music playback. The results were generally quite good, albeit with reservations. Those reservations are primarily tied to the problem of recreating 5.1 surround sound in a headset, because there are inevitably compromises that have to be made.

In this case the bass is quite weak and you rarely get the impression of a wide and precise soundstage. That's not to say the surround sound effect doesn't work, because it does, and this is towards the upper scale of the output we've had from such headsets in the past. But you can't shoehorn a proper 5.1 surround sound setup into a headset and get results that are close to what you'd expect from independent speakers.

Assuming you're aware of that, then TerraTec's set offers very good audio quality for the money. It dealt effectively with the materials we tested it on, and we particularly warmed to the Headset Master 5.1 when watching movies. We enjoyed using it with games, too, although these brought to the fore another issue, in that the headset isn't actually too comfortable to have on your head for a prolonged period of time.

Your reviewer's head is physically on the larger side, and even after attempted adjustments, it felt like the headset was clamping on. Conversely, a test subject with a small bonce found it a little too loose. You can't please all the people...

The end result is a better than average 5.1 surround sound headset which delivers on many of its promises, but is hampered by a problem or two that makes it good, but hardly essential.

One of the better 5.1 headsets on the market, although you'd be hard-pushed to wear it for hours at a time.