If you want Horizon Forbidden West to sound as good as it looks, we've got great news for you: the five-star Bang & Olufsen Beoplay Portal gaming headset is now available in a version for the PS5. The Portal knocked our gaming socks off in its original Xbox/PC-compatible version – as you can read in our full B&O Beoplay Portal review review. The new 'Beoplay Portal PC PS' is fully compatible not just with the PlayStation but with PC and mobile too.
Let's get the obvious thing out of the way first: it isn't cheap, coming in at £449 / €499 / $499. But as someone who spent that on AirPods Max to better hear my collection of Daphne & Celeste downloads, I'm not going to criticise the price: when you hear what the Beoplay Portal does, I don't think you'll quibble with the price tag. It earned a place in our best gaming headsets guide for a reason.
This is no ordinary gaming headset
Our very own Robert Jones has tested more gaming headsets than you can shake a stick at, and he reckons that the Beoplay Portal is an absolute must buy if you can afford them: in his Beoplay Portal review he praised pretty much everything and pointed out that "the Portal are both high-end noise cancelling gaming headset and high-end noise-cancelling headphones in one product, and when you look at them like that, the price becomes easier to stomach."
So what's so good about them? The sound is of course the main draw here, and B&O knows a thing or two about premium audio. Here it uses 40mm electro-dynamic drivers with neodymium magnets for spectacular stereo and surround sound. There's Bluetooth 5.1 and aptX Adaptive, and the included app has customisable EQ and sound presets. The PS version also boasts a new generation of noise cancelling alongside One Voice, which enables you to hear yourself without external sounds leaking in and spoiling the audio immersion.
The "virtual boom mic" is clever too, dispensing with the usual boom arm and using beam-forming microphones instead, delivering exceptionally clear results as well as brilliant smartphone calling compatibility.
It's incredibly comfortable and if you're a frequent traveller it'll guarantee you death stares from your fellow noise cancellers: these are very special headphones indeed.
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Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series; her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. When she’s not scribbling, Carrie is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind (unquietmindmusic).
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