Microphone Performance

The microphone of the 1MORE Spearhead VRX was tested by connecting it to the ASUS ROG STRIX X99 Gaming motherboard.

To review the microphone's sound and compare it to other similar headsets, I used the Adam A7X speakers and Shure SRH840 headphones, both being studio monitors, connected to Audiolab's M-DAC, a high-quality digital-to-analog converter that functions as an external sound card when connected to a PC. Testing was done in Discord, TeamSpeak, Skype, and Audacity, and I also used Audacity to record sound from the microphones. The sound was recorded with microphone sensitivity set to 100% and was not post-processed or edited in any way.

For reference, this voice recording has been made with the Rode NT-USB, a high-quality studio microphone:



This is the sound recorded by using the microphone that's built into the 1MORE Spearhead VRX gaming headset:



The 1MORE Spearhead VRX uses a pinhole microphone, like those you'd find on a pair of travel headphones and use for phone calls. As you can hear in my sample, the quality of said microphone is disappointing. Even though my voice is fairly clear and understandable, and gets picked up without issues, it has next to no depth, dynamics or bass. It sounds like I'm talking into the microphone from too far away, which I am. You generally want to get the microphone capsule as close to your mouth as possible, which simply isn't possible with this design as there's no microphone arm you could move around. Even though my teammates generally understood what I was saying, this isn't a microphone you'll be able to use for your Twitch or YouTube streams or other demanding tasks. When you dish out a full $200 for a gaming headset, that's a problem. Every other gaming headset in this price bracket (Sennheiser GSP 500, SteelSeries Arctis Pro, Turtle Beach Elite Pro Tournament, to name a few) comes with an incomparably better microphone.

One thing the 1MORE Spearhead VRX does well in the microphone department is the noise canceling. It uses two additional microphones on the frame behind both ear cups to listen to environmental noise and cancel it out. It does so without completely destroying the voice quality with compression and other related artifacts. I recorded two samples where you can hear me talking into the microphone while mashing on my mechanical keyboard (Cherry MX Red switches) in the background, with ENC off and on.




You could even argue that the ENC feature actually improves the voice quality to some extent, making it slightly more natural and forward-sounding due to the fact that it cancels out the auditory impact of the room, which becomes more significant the further away you move from the microphone capsule.