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

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. 

You can use the individual 10-step graphic equalizers for chat and the mic, so you can optimize one for clarity and the other for your best broadcast voice. The updated ClearCast 2 mic definitely hits SteelSeries’ goal for optimum clarity, though for plain old voice it lacks some of the warmth that some other mics provide. 

Sonar also provides ClearCast AI noise cancellation, which seems to work really well without making your voice sound tinny or overprocessed. It lets you separately adjust the amount of NR for background noise (low, continuous sounds like fans) and impact noise, like keyboard pounding. It does a really good job on the latter, significantly muffling the sound of my seriously loud mechanical keyboard (tactile clicky FTW!).

SteelSeries switches from standard DTS surround sound to its own Sonar Spatial Audio, which translates position data within games into its own directional system. It works pretty well, but that’s partly because of how effective its tuning is. It has two sliders, a scale of performance to immersion and distance. Performance narrows the directionality of the sound, so you can better isolate (for example) footsteps, while immersion expands it for a more continuous 360-degree sound, like the voices in Senua’s head in Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice that seem to come from everywhere. 

It doesn’t let you adjust individual speaker locations, like Razer’s THX does, but I don’t miss that here: The left and right rear channels, which I frequently hear too close to left and right, were correctly positioned.

Using spatial also seems the best way to listen to music. Without it, music sounds kind of flat, even with equalizer tweaks. The headset seems to consider movies an afterthought and music an after-afterthought, with only a couple of movie presets and no music presets.

There are also separate configuration settings as part of the main GG Engine, which can get confusing where they overlap; for instance, there’s also a graphic equalizer in settings, which is disabled if you have the Sonar equalizer active. It does have a toggle between optimizing the wireless signal for performance (lowest latency) or range. That didn’t seem to make much of a difference to me, though — at about 30 feet (through a couple of walls) it started to get a bit wonky. It’s pretty typical, though.

Battery life seems middle of the road. For instance, extrapolating from my current experience it should hit about 18 hours or so just from listening to music with no mic use. There are a lot of variables to consider here, though, such as the number of devices connected. SteelSeries mitigates it a bit with the battery swappability. In theory, you could buy more batteries and keep going forever.