Microphone Performance

The detachable microphone of the Corsair HS70 Wireless was tested by connecting it to the ASUS ROG STRIX X99 Gaming motherboard over the supplied wireless USB dongle.

To review the microphone's sound and compare it to similar headsets, I used the Adam A7X speakers and Shure SRH840 headphones, 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 the Corsair HS70 Wireless is supplied with:



I'm inclined to think Corsair went with the same microphone capsule they're using on the Void Pro RGB Wireless. Compared to it, the microphone of the HS70 Wireless has slightly more background noise, but it generally sounds almost the same—tinny, fairly compressed, and without any particular depth or dynamics to speak of. It's perfectly suitable for Discord, Teamspeak, Skype or any in-game voice chat as it does stay clear at all times, but that's about as far as it will take you. The same could be said of pretty much any other wireless gaming headset microphone. Even the best ones, such as that of the HyperX Cloud Flight, can't really be used for serious streaming, voiceovers and other more demanding tasks. Take a listen of the following samples to hear exactly what I mean: