Microphone Performance

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

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



This is the sound recorded by using the bidirectional noise-canceling microphone the SteelSeries Arctis Pro is supplied with:




This microphone is excellent. The input on the GameDAC has no audible background noise to it at all, and the clarity, depth, and naturalness of the voice is good enough for this microphone to be used for most demanding tasks, such as Twitch and YouTube streaming and voiceovers. The microphone can be adjusted to sound even louder—my samples were recorded by setting it to 100% in Windows and to 8 (out of 10) on the GameDAC. That's the optimal way to use it. It's even louder when set to 9 or 10, but then becomes so sensitive that it will pick up the sound of your room and anything in it, which should generally be avoided. As you can hear, it sounds the same with the windscreen on and off, so you don't have to use it if you don't want to. However, adding the windscreen makes the headset look a bit more professional, which could be important to you if you're wearing it while streaming.

Let's compare it to the microphones of the less expensive Arctis 3, 5, and 7:





It clearly beats all of them. I especially like the fact that the faint background buzz that was present on the Arctis 5—its USB sound card, to be more precise—is completely gone on the Arctis Pro (and/or the GameDAC).

As the Arctis Pro is a $250/€280 gaming headset, it was only natural for me to also bring out the biggest guns in my current arsenal. Take a listen of the microphone samples recorded on the $230 Sennheiser Game One, $250 Sennheiser GSP 600 (review pending), and $350 Beyerdynamic MMX 300 Gen2 (review pending).





Although both Beyerdynamic and Sennheiser offer warmer-sounding microphones, the one attached to the Arctis Pro can definitely holds its own when going head to head with them. Great job, SteelSeries!