Microphone Performance

The omnidirectional boom microphone of the Turtle Beach Stealth 450 was tested by connecting it to the Asus ROG STRIX X99 Gaming motherboard. It uses an integrated sound card with Realtek's ALC1150 audio codec, including a number of software tweaks for suppressing ambient noise and adding various effects, which were all turned off for this test in order to obtain the microphone's raw, unmodified sound. I also used an external USB sound card, Creative's cheap Sound Blaster E1 ($42), and again turned off all the software features that could affect the sound of the microphone.

To review the microphone's sound and compare it to similar headsets, I used the Adam A7X speakers and Shure SRH840 headphones, them 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 microphone. 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 omnidirectional boom microphone the Turtle Beach Stealth 450 is supplied with:



You don't have to be an expert to hear that my voice sounds compressed. You can probably also hear a bit of popping, especially present on consonants. It worsens when you bring the head of the microphone too close to your mouth, so if you have issues with it, just move it further away. I managed to mostly get rid of it after putting a windscreen on the microphone (not supplied). Take a listen:



Even when equipped with a windscreen, the microphone is by far the weakest link of an otherwise terrific headset. Let's compare it to those of a couple other headsets:










As you can hear, pretty much all of the other microphones sound better than the one supplied with the Stealth 450.

Don't get me wrong, the microphone's quality is decent enough for it to be used for in-game voice communication, in either Voice Activation or Push-to-Talk mode. However, you definitely won't be using it for streaming, recording voiceovers or any other even remotely more demanding scenario.