Microphone Performance

The boom microphone of the SteelSeries Arctis 7 was tested by connecting it to the Asus ROG STRIX X99 Gaming motherboard.

To review the microphone's sound and to compare it to other similar headsets, I used the Adam A7X speakers and Shure SRH840 headphones, 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 Rode NT-USB, a high-quality studio microphone:



This is the sound recorded by using the bidirectional microphone the SteelSeries Arctis 7 is supplied with:



Even though the microphone is exactly the same as the one supplied with the Arctis 5, it doesn't sound nearly as clear and natural when wirelessly connected to the supplied WiFi dongle/sound card. Its sound is noticeably more compressed. For comparison, take a listen of how the Arctis 5 microphone sounds:



When you plug both of them into an external sound card (I used the $50 Creative Sound Blaster E1), it becomes very obvious that we're dealing with the same microphone and that you can get much more out of it than you're getting when using the supplied sound card:




Let's take a listen of the microphones of two other headsets from the $100-150 price category, both of them being wired and supplied with their own USB sound cards:




Even though they're less bassy, I'd give the advantage to both of them over the microphone of the Arctis 7 in terms of clarity, although it needs to be said that neither of them sounds impressive and completely in line with the price.

All in all, while being perfectly suitable for chatting while gaming, if you're looking for a headset that comes with a microphone good enough for serious Twitch streaming or YouTube voiceovers, this isn't it.