Microphone Performance

The noise-cancelling microphone of the Sennheiser Game One was tested by connecting it to the Asus ROG STRIX X99 Gaming motherboard. It uses an integrated sound card with the ALC1150 audio codec, including a number of software tweaks for suppressing ambient noise and adding various effects. All of this was 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 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 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 Sennheiser Game One is supplied with:




This is without a doubt the best microphone I ever ran across on a gaming headset. My voice sounds natural, deep, rich, and simply beautiful. My teammates couldn't compliment the microphone enough, and after listening to these samples, it's very obvious why that's the case. You can use a microphone of this quality for anything you want; communicating with your teammates, talking to your viewers while streaming on YouTube or Twitch, recording voiceovers for your videos - with a microphone this good, anything goes. If I had to pick a single headset to use for the rest of my life based on its microphone quality, the Game One would be the one.

For comparison, here are microphone samples of a few other gaming headsets. I also threw in a V-Moda BoomPro sample, which is a terrific $30 microphone that can be attached to any pair of headphones with a detachable cable (and a 3.5-mm port). Some of them are great, but nothing can compare to the Game One's fantastic microphone.