Microphone Performance

The detachable, noise-canceling microphone of the Rosewill Nebula GX30 was tested by connecting it to the Asus ROG Maximus IX Code motherboard. It uses an integrated sound card with the 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 and to 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. The 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 GX30 is supplied with:




The microphone's quality is very good. My voice doesn't sound too compressed, there's no significant popping, and the microphone's volume is high enough to where I didn't have to boost it to make it usable. I just set the gain to 100%, got on Discord, and started chatting with my teammates with no issues at all. This is by no means a broadcast-quality microphone - much greater depth and naturality are needed for that - but it's perfectly usable for in-game communication, and that's about as good as you could hope for when buying one of the least expensive gaming headsets on the market. In fact, if you compare it to the samples listed below, you'll notice that it sounds nicer than microphones of other headsets in the $50 price bracket, bar the one that comes with the HyperX Cloud Stinger: