360 Headset troubles

[Sane]

I recently convinced one of my friends he needed a 360, basically saying how cool it would be if we could play VT3 and such online and chat using the headset. So he went out and bought one except now we are having some trouble with the headset.

The problem is the signal seems to be not coming through correctly. I can hear what he says although it's all a bit muffled and distorted, but he can't hear me at all and only hears distortion. We had MS send a new headset thinking it must be broken, tried other controllers and various combinations, all with the same results pretty much.

I'm thinking it's most likely due to some sort of interference in his area, could it be caused by wireless networks or GSM signals? And more importantly, is there anything we can do about it? There are no problems at all with the 360 pad btw, which I'm assuming uses the same signal to reach the 360.

[egparadigm]

Have you got an OG Xbox communicator headset? They have the same size jack, so you could use that to double check the connection.

Just to check: you are chatting from the dash?

[cavalcade]

The Xbox 360 wired headset (if that is what you're talking about) is fairly poor. The quality of the signal will never be fantastic, but try the following:

1) Unlikely, but make sure you have all the ports required by Live opened on your router as recommended by Microsoft. If some or all of the ports are closed then voice comms can fail to work properly.

2) Try opening a private voice channel, and not using the in-game channel, is it any clearer?

3) Is it clearer if one of you hosts, rather than the other? Perhaps there are bandwidth issues - do you both use low speed ADSL connections?

4) If all fails, ditch the 360 headset. Buy a universal headset adaptor from eBay (about 7 quid) and buy a decent headset online (£10-£20), or use your old Xbox headset which is a lot better.

[Sane]

Ok thanks for the suggestions. Private chat we tried, different hosts we tried and we both have decent connections. I'm gonna try the ports though, I'm sure we haven't set them up at his end so I hope that will help.

Do you have any links for those headset adapters? I'm not sure what buy exactly.