Wireless Performance

The SteelSeries Arctis 1 Wireless comes with an interesting wireless dongle with a USB-C port. The dongle establishes a 2.4 GHz wireless radio connection with the headset, which is rock-stable at all times and offers plenty of range as well. I moved around my apartment without ever losing connectivity to the receiver, which came in handy when I wanted to keep talking to my teammates while grabbing a snack from the fridge.


There are two main ways of using the aforementioned wireless dongle. You can plug it into the supplied USB Type-A-to-USB-C extension cable and use the Arctis 1 Wireless on your PC or PlayStation 4. Alternatively, you can plug the dongle directly into a USB-C port of your mobile device of choice, such as your smartphone or the Nintendo Switch. I tested this on several Android phones, and it worked flawlessly. As soon as I plugged the dongle in, a headset icon would appear next to the battery icon, and I was instantly able to listen to sounds from my phone, as well as use the microphone to communicate with my friends through the mobile version of Discord, Skype, or any other VoIP app.

Battery Life

Battery life of the SteelSeries Arctis 1 Wireless is great. I was regularly getting up to 25 hours of wireless usage, which meant I had to recharge it once per week, or sometimes even less often. The battery status can be monitored in the SteelSeries Engine 3 software, where you'll see a battery icon filled with an appropriate number of bars. To be honest, I'd be much happier with a percentile value.

When the battery level becomes critical, you'll start hearing beeping inside the headphones. While you could still use the headset for around two hours until the battery drains completely, the beeping is frequent and annoying enough that you'll want to plug it in as soon as it starts. It can, of course, be used and charged at the same time.

The headset also offers an auto-shutdown feature, which will turn it off when no sound input is detected for a set amount of time (5, 10, 30, 60, or 90 minutes).