Microphone Performance

The microphone of the XPG Precog was tested by connecting it to the ASUS Maximus XI Formula motherboard. To review the microphone's sound and compare it to 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 microphone. 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 detachable omnidirectional microphone supplied with the XPG Precog, with ENC turned off and on:




While the microphone capsule does a satisfactory job at picking up the naturality and depth of my voice, there's one glaring issue: the high-pitched background noise, which just about anyone with a healthy set of ears will be able to hear. While my teammates couldn't hear it when we were playing Rocket League or Call of Duty: Warzone, simply because it got drowned out by in-game audio, they did notice it whenever we were just chatting without playing. The issue is caused by the supplied USB sound card. How do I know? Because it completely disappeared after I switched to analogue and plugged the XPG Precog into my external USB sound card (the lovely Creative Sound Blaster X3). Take a listen of the following sample to hear it for yourself.



You can also lower the gain of the microphone to make the high-pitched noise harder to hear. Here's what it sounds like with microphone gain set to 80% in Windows.



As for the ENC feature, here are two microphone samples which demonstrate it in action. In the first sample, I'm typing on my mechanical keyboard with Cherry MX Red switches and ENC turned off. In the second sample, I'm doing the same, but with ENC turned on.




As you can hear, the ENC feature does a good job of filtering out the background without introducing too many artifacts. I'm under the impression that the microphone does a certain level of background filtering even with ENC turned off since my keyboard's mechanical switches don't sound natural in that scenario either.