Plantronics USB TO HEADSET ADAPTER ( DA60 )

I had the Plantronics headset and I love the feel so I got this setup to use on the computer. It works well, you won't be recording podcast quality, but it's above phone quality. Maybe it's like AM Radio quality.

It's also kind of bulky cabling. I never complain about durable cables. But that plastic bubble box that converts the signal, it's kinda bigger than I thought. Not too bad, but I'd almost wished I'd have spent the money on the best USB plantronics headset instead of trying to repurpose mine with this adapter. On the other hand this setup is durable and good. I do like it I just wish I could squeeze a little more quality out of it. I think it's a good product.

The microphone portion of the DA40 works great with any H-Series Plantronics headset I have tried.

However, I found the audio in the earpiece to be very low volume and rather tinny and distorted.

Fooling around with the audio control panel, I found that moving the balance control to the extreme left or right produced very clear audio and brought the volume WAY up.

Apparently, what is causing this is that the DA40 is combining left and right audio from the Windows USB driver out-of-phase. This results in partial cancellation of the audio, which is causing the low audio and distortion. The DA40 is outputting the difference between the right and left channels, rather than the sum of the signals.

There are a few issues with doing the balance control trick to get good audio quality and volume from the DA40. First, if the Windows application is sending stereo data to the USB driver and you move the balance control to extreme left or right, you are excluding the audio from one channel from the mono output of the DA40. The solution in Windows XP is to set the speaker type to "Mono" or "Laptop Mono". This mixes the left and right channels together in the PC. You still need to move the balance control to the extreme right or left as the DA40 will still mix the channels out of phase and distort the output. By setting the speaker type in the driver to "Laptop Mono", you are assuring all the stereo imformation is mixed together on both the left and right channels. Confusing, yes?

On Windows 7/Vista, there is no good solution as these operating systems do not allow setting the speaker type to "Mono". You can still do the balance setting trick, but if the application you are using (Windows Media Player, for example) sends stereo sound to the DA40, you will only hear one channel in the headset connected to the DA40. This is not an issue with most VOIP application, like Skype, as the left and right signals sent to the USB driver are the same, and the DA40 will work perfectly.

Another issue is the balance settings may not "stick" if you unplug the DA40 or change the master volume level. You may need to reset the balance control in these cases.

Bottom line: To get best performance from the DA40, set the speaker type in the driver to "Mono" (if your OS supports it) and use the balance controls to select all right or all left output.

The DA40 works great if you do this.

I have tried two different headsets namely H251N and H251. Same problem as reported by the previous reviewer - people can hear me well, but not the other way around. I have also tried playing mp3 files - and the quality is horrible. The sound is muffled, unclear, volume is low and there is some background noise. It appears that this unit is defective - some other people report good experience. Alternatively, this could be the Windows 7 issue (I have a 64 bit version - maybe this is not compatible with the device). In any event this is not useable

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