Microphone Performance

The microphone of the SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro was tested by connecting the headset to the supplied GameDAC Gen 2 external USB sound card. 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 Topping A90 Discrete, a high-quality headphone amplifier, and speaker preamplifier. The EVGA NU Audio Pro PCI Express sound card handled the digital-to-analog conversion, connected to Topping's excellent unit with the AudioQuest Evergreen RCA cable. 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 SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro.



The microphone sounds very good. My voice is clear and sufficiently loud, and there's no background noise to report, even though I have the air conditioning humming in the background, as well as case fans spinning a meter away from my sitting position. Even without the supplied pop filter, there are no issues with plosives. The Arctis Nova Pro is more than capable of handling your endless Discord sessions. Should you want to tweak the sound of your voice, you can play around with the 10-band microphone equalizer offered within the SteelSeries GG software suite or use the premade profiles. Most of them are very subtle, though, so you'll have to resort to manual tuning for the best results.

Here's a direct comparison between the microphone quality of the Arctis Nova Pro and Nova Pro Wireless.




The samples tell the whole story. The microphone capsules are identical, but wireless connectivity introduces significant compression, making the Arctis Nova Pro's microphone sound more natural, open, and airy. No real surprises there; that's exactly what we've expected.