SteelSeries GG

For a long time, all SteelSeries' peripherals were configured through the SteelSeries Engine software driver. It looked nice and worked without a hitch, so it was a pleasure to use. Sadly, SteelSeries decided to integrate it into an annoyingly elaborate software suite SteelSeries GG. It still contains the good old Engine but also has a massive commercial homepage, where SteelSeries is trying to sell you their various products, as well as a separate Giveaways section and a Moments section used for gameplay capture. Like you don't already have 17 other ways of doing the exact same thing.


Equally annoying is the fact that the Arctis Nova 3 uses two separate parts of the SteelSeries GG suite for its configuration. In the Engine section of the suite, you can access a 6-band system-wide equalizer, several EQ profiles, microphone volume and sidetone controls; microphone LED brightness slider, and RGB illumination settings. However, a message at the top of the Engine window will urge you to switch to the Sonar section of the SteelSeries GG software suite to get full control over your gaming and chat audio. At the same time, the Sonar section doesn't offer any RGB lighting system controls, so you're sort of stuck using two separate parts of the software to get complete control over the Arctis Nova 3. SteelSeries needs to streamline the user experience, and I find it quite surprising they still didn't do so; the SteelSeries GG suite didn't conceptually change from last year.


In the Sonar section of the SteelSeries GG suite, you'll find a much more modern and significantly more advanced way of tuning the Arctis Nova 3. First, you'll be greeted by a mixer with a Master, Game, Chat, Media, AUX, and Microphone sliders. What Sonar does is create four separate virtual playback devices: SteelSeries Sonar – Gaming, SteelSeries Sonar – Chat, SteelSeries Sonar – Media, and SteelSeries Sonar - Aux. That gives you a high level of control over your sound sources, which can be especially beneficial if you're a streamer, as you'll be able to do things like listen to music while gaming without the music being audible to your audience and similar. You can also, for example, "route" your music app to the SteelSeries Sonar – Media virtual device and configure an equalizer profile you prefer for your music listening sessions, which can be completely different to the EQ profile you're using for in-game audio. One of the more obvious purposes of having four separate virtual playback devices is having the option to set the SteelSeries Sonar – Gaming as your default playback device and then choosing SteelSeries Sonar – Chat as your playback device in your voice app of choice, such as Discord. Then you can use the ChatMix feature of the SteelSeries GG software suite to balance the volume between Discord and everything else. In practice, you'll use this feature if the game is too loud compared to the voices of your friends (or vice versa). It's a useful feature, made even better by separate Game and Chat volume sliders in the Sonar section of the SteelSeries GG suite and dedicated equalizers for all virtual playback devices.


All four virtual channels, Game, Chat, Media, and Aux, come with their own equalizers. The Game, Media, and Aux channels offer a parametric equalizer, which gives you the freedom to adjust the output of the headphones absolutely any way you like. You're also welcome to use one of the many profiles offered by SteelSeries, including various game-specific ones. If you don't feel at home with parametric equalization, you can opt to use the bass, voice, and treble sliders below the equalizer without ever touching the equalizer itself. The Game, Media, and Aux tabs also offer a button to turn on the virtual surround sound technology (Microsoft Spatial Sound, 360° Spatial Audio, and Tempest 3D Audio are supported, depending on the platform), while the Chat and Microphone tabs have the ClearCast AI Noise Cancellation toggle, which at the time of my review was in early access and as such far from its final form.


SteelSeries even added a 10-band microphone equalizer, along with a handful of factory profiles tuned to fix some of the potential deficiencies of your voice. Here you'll also find two noise reduction sliders, a noise gate slider, and a smart voice slider. Noise gate completely cuts off the sounds below a certain volume level, while smart voice aims to crush the dynamics of the voice in order to make it equally audible regardless of how loud or quiet you're currently speaking.

As a whole, the Sonar section of the SteelSeries GG suite is quite impressive, but SteelSeries should look to integrate all of the features of the Engine into it so we don't have to switch between the two to access all of the adjustment options of the Arctis Nova 3. I also ran into a bug (potentially a feature?) where the SteelSeries GG would take over the default sound playback device after every system restart. If you're using multiple sound cards on your system, this can be quite annoying.