Grace's
Member
The interesting part of the ROG Gjallar is not the bar. It is the separate LCD hub sitting next to it with the microphones built in. Acoustic echo cancellation strips the game audio and your squad's voices back out before your mic sends them, and beamforming is meant to knock down the PC fans behind you. That is the thing people have actually been asking for, because three hours into a session the headset is the part you want gone, not the audio.
The speaker side reads like a desktop soundbar rather than a home theatre one. Four 50mm full-range drivers, two 27mm tweeters, up-firing channels for a 2.1.2 Atmos layout, and a 6.5-inch 65W sub on its own 5GHz link. Up-firing height channels three feet from your face, bouncing off a ceiling eight feet up, is optimistic at best. I would expect the height layer here to be more of a widening effect than anything you could point at.
Connectivity is where the $599.99 starts to make sense: HDMI 2.1 with eARC and 4K/120 passthrough, USB-C, optical, analogue, Bluetooth 5.3, two USB-A for dongles. That genuinely is a desk hub rather than a speaker. For comparison the LG UltraGear GP9 sat at $500 with no sub and no HDMI, so ASUS is asking a hundred more for considerably more box.
Who should skip it: anyone who already has a receiver and real speakers within arm's reach of the desk. You will not beat that with a bar, and you can add a decent mic for far less than the difference.
Is the echo cancellation actually good enough that your teammates cannot tell, though? That is the whole pitch and I have not seen anyone test it properly.
The speaker side reads like a desktop soundbar rather than a home theatre one. Four 50mm full-range drivers, two 27mm tweeters, up-firing channels for a 2.1.2 Atmos layout, and a 6.5-inch 65W sub on its own 5GHz link. Up-firing height channels three feet from your face, bouncing off a ceiling eight feet up, is optimistic at best. I would expect the height layer here to be more of a widening effect than anything you could point at.
Connectivity is where the $599.99 starts to make sense: HDMI 2.1 with eARC and 4K/120 passthrough, USB-C, optical, analogue, Bluetooth 5.3, two USB-A for dongles. That genuinely is a desk hub rather than a speaker. For comparison the LG UltraGear GP9 sat at $500 with no sub and no HDMI, so ASUS is asking a hundred more for considerably more box.
Who should skip it: anyone who already has a receiver and real speakers within arm's reach of the desk. You will not beat that with a bar, and you can add a decent mic for far less than the difference.
Is the echo cancellation actually good enough that your teammates cannot tell, though? That is the whole pitch and I have not seen anyone test it properly.
