Microphone Performance

The pivotable omnidirectional microphone of the Corsair HS80 RGB Wireless was tested in both wireless and USB mode. 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 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 microphone the Corsair HS80 RGB Wireless is supplied with in both wireless and USB mode:




As far as Corsair's HS gaming headset lineup goes, this is the best microphone capsule they're using on any of their wireless models. It is tonally well balanced, with a nice amount of depth and a much lower level of compression compared to, say, the HS70 Pro Wireless or the HS75 XB Wireless. Corsair is still saving their best wireless gaming headset microphone capsule for the Virtuoso RGB Wireless (reviewed here), but no other Corsair headset comes close. You can hear this for yourself in the samples below. Interestingly, the microphone has the same tonality in USB mode, but with a cleaner output, which is as it should be since there's no quality loss caused by wireless data transfer. All in all, this microphone served me well in my Discord endeavors.