Microphone Performance

The microphone of the SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless was tested by connecting the headset to the supplied wireless base station. To review the microphone's sound and compare it to similar headsets, I used the Adam A7X speakers and Shure SRH840 headphones, both of which fall into the studio monitor category. I connected them to the Audiolab 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, Skype, and Audacity, and I also used Audacity to record the sound from the microphone. The sound was recorded with microphone sensitivity set to 100% and not post-processed or edited in any way.

For reference, this voice recording was made with the Rode NT-USB, a high-quality studio microphone:



This is the sound recorded by using the retractable bidirectional microphone of the SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless.



This is one of the best wireless gaming headset microphones I have tested to date. While not as natural sounding as a higher-end wired gaming headset microphone, it's plenty loud and perfectly intelligible even when you find yourself in a noisier environment. Even without the supplied pop filter, there are no issues with plosives, nor is there any interference.

The SteelSeries GG software suite offers a full 10-band microphone equalizer with eight factory presets. Here's an example of one of them, called Deep Voice.



As you can hear, the changes in my voice are fairly subtle, but some additional depth has been added. All that happens without introducing any additional compression or artifacts, so the microphone equalizer is one of many perfectly usable features of the Arctis Nova Pro Wireless.

Finally, here are voice samples recorded by various other popular wireless gaming headsets, which you can compare to the Arctis Nova Pro Wireless sample. Particularly interesting is the comparison to the SteelSeries Arctis 7 and Arctis 9, where you can hear how much SteelSeries has improved its wireless microphone quality.