Asus ROG Cetra Open

It makes perfect sense to wear "open" in-ear headphones in a number of situations, right? You may want to hear the sound, but still be aware of your surroundings. You may need to move around, and the seal provided by closed headphones or silicone tips on traditional in-ear headphones may not be secure enough.

Gaming in-ear headphones already exist, but Asus has now taken this open design profile and created the ROG Cetra Open, which attempts to combine the more frictionless open construction with all the gaming-related bells and whistles that belong to a traditional ROG product. The question is whether this marriage makes any sense at all.

So what can they do? Well, this is a case that holds two devices and supports Bluetooth and multipoint via 2.4GHz ultra-low latency via a dongle and Asus' ROG SpeedNova protocol. This means you can plug in the dongle, which also has a charging passthrough, and automatically connect without any fuss.

Inside, we find a 14.2-millimetre "Diamond-Like" carbon fibre driver and quad microphones with AI-based noise reduction, which supposedly capture your voice through beamforming and remove noise.

Okay, so it's all pretty much as usual, at least among gaming in-ears. You have the case, you have the dongle, you have multipoint, so you can also connect to your phone - it's all here. But it's this open design that makes or breaks it. And that actually makes perfect sense. Again, what you sacrifice is precisely the enclosed immersion that comes from the isolation provided by active noise cancellation and a pair of silicone-based in-ear headphones or just a closed set of headphones. But what you get instead is an awareness of the space you're sitting in, which is smart when, like me, you're a family man with two cute little boys and don't enjoy disappearing completely.

And the comfort is a pretty obvious plus, because by sitting "on top" of the ear, there is no heavy feeling that can quickly arise after several hours of use with a conventional headset. No, the sound is not quite as good, but on the other hand, I don't get a headache.

The microphone is also surprisingly solid. No, it's not like sitting with a boomer microphone that can laser-focus on your voice and pick up all the bass and depth, but it's really not bad for what it is.

However, there is a bit of an elephant in the room, and that is the two physical buttons, one on each device. To be blunt, for me, they simply don't work. A double press on the right button is supposed to increase the volume, but this has been either unreliable or completely non-functional throughout the entire test period. It's not known whether the device is defective or not, but it is unfortunate, to say the least.

But apart from that, the sound quality is actually quite decent. No, the bass isn't great, nor is the depth, but it's actually better than you might think, just like other times I've tried open in-ears - you don't lose as much of the sound quality as you might think.

We will update with a full price, but it's estimated to be roughly in line with other gaming-related in-ear headphones. If the buttons worked, we would talk about the ROG Cetra Open a little differently, but if they work as intended, this is not bad at all.