Microphone Performance

The detachable microphone of the Rosewill Nebula GX50 was tested by connecting it to the Asus ROG STRIX X99 Gaming 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 microphones. The sound was recorded with the microphone's 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 microphone the Rosewill Nebula GX50 is supplied with:



If the sample sounds very quiet to you, there's nothing wrong with your headphones or speakers - the supplied microphone is very, very quiet. The solution is to boost it through its driver (or Windows Control Panel) - only then does it become usable. Here's a sound clip I recorded after activating the boost function in Rosewill's driver:



Some background noise is introduced after boosting the microphone, but it at least becomes usable for Discord, TeamSpeak, and any other VoIP software you might use to communicate with your teammates. Even when boosted, the microphone needs to be extremely close to your mouth. That's why you hear quite a bit of popping whenever I hit the plosives (letters "P" and "B", for example). I wasn't able to do anything to fix this; the microphone capsule simply isn't sensitive enough to offer more volume. My teammates were able to understand me most of the time, but I kept feeling as though I had to talk louder than usual, which I found somewhat annoying. Also, whenever the in-game background was louder (e.g. my squad was driving in a car), my friends had quite a bit of trouble hearing me. With all of that in mind, the microphone is the weakest part of the Nebula GX50.

Here's what microphones on several other $50 or cheaper headsets sound like. Note that all of them are significantly louder than the one on the Nebula GX50, without any additional boosting. None of them offer the quality needed for serious game streaming or voiceovers, but that's not something you expect to find in this price-range anyway: