Image: Razer
Unless you review gaming headsets for a living, it can be tricky to tell the best-sounding ones from those that are just okay. That’s especially the case with gaming headsets in the midrange-to-premium tier, which generally all have high setpoints for audio fidelity.
Naturally, you want the best-sounding headset there is for your money, not the second best, so here are a few tips to tell the wheat from the slightly lesser-quality wheat (so to speak).
Are there any unwanted defects?
First and foremost, you shouldn’t hear any strange sounds in your earcups, like pops, crackles, or static. These indicate the presence of unwanted defects in the audio stream.
Sometimes updating the audio drivers and addressing compatibility issues will be enough to fix these problems. But if you’ve done that and the sounds persist, you can instantly disqualify the headset from belonging to the vanguard category for quality.
In fact, you should immediately send your headset back to the manufacturer, because it’s probably a dud.
Further reading: The best gaming headsets
A technique to determine audio clarity
Even if you can’t hear defects, your headset still has to impress in the audio-clarity stakes.
Discerning clarity is easy. All you have to do is listen for the presence or absence of muddiness in the audio stream. An absence is what you want — it means your headset has great drivers and a clear sound.
A headset free of muddiness should also allow you to easily distinguish between different sounds (and instruments) when a cacophony are played together, so be sure to test your headset by playing a bunch of audio tracks.
For vocals, the same process can be applied. Voices shouldn’t sound muffled, distant, or have an echo. Remember, you want to not only test the clarity of the sound in your headset proper, but in your microphone too, seeing as clarity in one doesn’t guarantee it in the other. The Logitech G Pro X 2 Lightspeed headset is an example of a headset that has very fine audio clarity for both its audio stream and microphone.
As a side note, if you do hear muddiness or muffling, it might not mean your headset isn’t capable of clear audio. Again, it could just point to compatibility issues, drivers needing updating, or dust or dirt in your headset, so be sure to investigate those things before you make a final call.
How the tones should sound
Right off the bat, you’ll want to know that you can hear a wide spectrum of tones, indicating that the headset has a balanced frequency response (making for a well-rounded, balanced listening experience).
If that’s not the case, you may want to have a play around with the EQ settings in your headset’s companion app to see what it’s capable of. With the SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless headset, you can personalize EQ settings for individual games to emphasize useful sounds like player footsteps.
You also want to listen for how the tones sound. Ask yourself, do they sound vibrant and convincing, or flat and dull? When evaluating the three tonal categories, lows, mids, and highs, it’s easiest to play a few games and compare what you hear against a set of ideal descriptive criteria. I use the following, for example:
- Lows: Deep, full-bodied, and clear but not dominant
- Mids: Warm and well balanced instead of flat sounding
- Highs: Crisp, bright, and textured without tinniness
One extra point: Some headsets will be tuned to emphasize specific frequencies out of the box — be it mids or bass, and that can have consequences for your gaming.
For most games, you want a headset that emphasizes neutral tones by being slightly skewed to the mids. That way, you will be able to hear the broadest range of game sounds and not miss out on the full impact of sounds important for competitive play, like gunshots and player footsteps (which are typically a combination of different frequencies).
A respectable bass can be a bonus, but you don’t want a headset tuned mostly for bass, what we call bloated bass tuning. In that case the bass is going to dominate and mask your game’s other sounds and make the audio sound unbalanced.
Listening for detail
When we talk about detail in the audio, we’re talking about elements of the sound that you wouldn’t be able to hear with a less capable headset.
Gamers on forums will often bring up the topic of sample rate and bit depth when they’re discussing audio detail, but apart from checking that your headset supports either a 44.1kHz or 48kHz sample rate and either a 16bit or 24bit bit depth, that’s not something you need to worry about much.
As with clarity, a field experiment is a great way to determine how your headset picks up detail. You can simply play a few games with an inferior headset or headphones on and then swap out to the headset you’re testing as a comparison. My pick of the bunch for detail is the Audeze Maxwell Wireless that has 90mm planar magnetic audio drivers instead of the more common neodymium audio drivers for a more rich and varied sound.
Razer
Razer
When you do, make a note of all the extra sounds, or layers of sound you can hear with your headset on versus the inferior one on — particularly at the ends of the sound spectrum.
If the change from one to the other is like night and day, with your headset picking up more sounds — the tinkling ethereal sounds of Elden Ring’s Weeping Peninsula, or every sprinkle of dirt falling to earth from an explosion in Battlefield, for example — that means your headset gets a thumbs up for detail.
And that’s it for now on headset audio quality. If you’ve followed these points and your headset has passed on all fronts — well done! You’ve found a good one.
For more guidance, though, be sure to read our roundup of the best gaming headsets, where we’ve already tested and rated a bunch of gaming headsets on their audio quality for you
Author: Dominic Bayley, Australian Editor, PCWorld
Based in Australia, Dominic Bayley is a hardcore tech enthusiast. His PCWorld focus is on PC gaming hardware: laptops, mice, headsets and keyboards.
