Microphone Performance

The pivotable microphone of the Rosewill Nebula GX10 was tested by connecting it to the Asus ROG Maximus IX Code motherboard. It uses an integrated sound card with S1220 audio codec, including a number of software tweaks for suppressing ambient noise and adding various effects. All of this has been turned off for this test in order to obtain the microphone's raw, unmodified sound. I also used an external USB sound card, Creative's cheap Sound Blaster E1 ($50), and again turned off all the software features that could affect the sound of the microphone.

To review the microphone's sound for a comparison 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 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 boom microphone the Rosewill Nebula GX10 is supplied with:




The microphone is a bit on the quiet side and sounds fairly compressed and telephonic. It becomes louder when I put its head very close to my mouth, but that's not something you can count on doing in practice since the microphone's arm is too short for that. If you don't bend it, it will naturally position itself about 5 centimeters away from your mouth. In case you do bend it, it will end up sitting halfway between the left ear cup and your mouth, facing your left cheek (unless you have a very small head). In other words, there's no way to place it directly in front of the mouth, so you won't get much more in terms of loudness than what you hear in my samples unless you boost it via the audio driver. On the upside, I was usually loud enough for my teammates to hear me unless we were driving in a car or flying in a plane, waiting to jump down onto a battleground - only then did I have to speak louder than I prefer.

The $37 Rosewill Nebula GX30 has a significantly better microphone, which you can hear for yourself by listening to its sound samples: