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SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless Review: Great but Imperfect Gaming Headset

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A successor to SteelSeries’ beloved flagship Arctis Pro gaming headset line, which turned four this year, the new SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro keeps some of …
A successor to SteelSeries’ beloved flagship Arctis Pro gaming headset line, which turned four this year, the new SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro keeps some of the best aspects of its predecessor and other Arctis kin, like the hot-swappable battery, dual 2.4GHz and Bluetooth wireless connectivity, speaker drivers designed for high-res audio and signature Arctis design and comfort. For the Nova Pros, SteelSeries upgraded aspects of the design and mic, increased battery life, switched connection types to match modern ports and consoles, swapped its spatial audio to a proprietary system, upgraded the GameDAC 2 (still only for the wired model) and more. The result is a fresh flagship headset that’s lost none of its gaming cred, but still feels a bit pricey. There are five models in the Nova Pro line: $250 for the wired Nova Pro and its Xbox-specific sibling and $350 for the wireless models for PC, Xbox and PlayStation. There isn’t a ton of variation among them. The Xbox models swap a USB connection and the second USB-C port on the base station for the necessary Xbox-compatible USB connector but are otherwise identical to their respective linemates. All the headsets are PS5-compatible: The PS5 model simply has different packaging for sale at retail. I tested the Nova Pro Wireless, which means I didn’t get to evaluate the new GameDAC. In addition to connecting to a PC or Mac via USB, you can output to the headset from a PS5 or Android phone equipped with a USB-C port via the base station (which is essentially the dongle), a Nintendo Switch (in TV mode) or anything that has a 3.5mm analog jack. The base station accepts an analog input as well, for mixing a stream on your PC. Among other things, SteelSeries removed the optical connections, which means if you’ve got an older console this isn’t a great choice. SteelSeries updated the acoustic pipeline (all the hardware between the incoming audio and your ear) and it sounds excellent, with clear lows, midrange and highs. My admittedly sub-audiophile ears couldn’t make out any unintended distortion with Doom Eternal’s heavy metal pounding as loud as my ears could stand. The earcups deliver solid noise isolation, and a transparency toggle decreases isolation so you can sort of hear outside noises like the air conditioner and someone talking too loudly on a conference call. The base station is capable of high-res audio up to 48kHz/24-bit and the serious parametric equalizer in SteelSeries’ new Sonar software (which lives within the company’s GG utility software) is excellent. (Compared with a graphic equalizer, which adjusts based on groups of frequencies, a parametric equalizer takes into account continuous transitions between the key frequencies. Besides, like magnets, Beziers make everything better.)
So, for instance, you can narrow the frequency of the output of a specific voice, footstep, vehicle and so on in a game to make it easier to hear and track them based on your own hearing characteristics. It comes with presets for a handful of popular multiplayer games as well as a generic “FPS Footsteps”, but you can tweak and save custom presets to your ears’ desire.

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