STEELSERIES ARCTIS 7 WIRELESS GAMING HEADSET
Grown-up gaming cans with real quality
NO RGB LIGHTING? No tribal designs? It’s not even named after a Greek god! Is this really a gaming headset? The Arctis 7 definitely does things differently. Central to this $150 wireless headset’s design is the “ski goggle” headband, a length of adjustable elastic fabric whose purpose is to keep the full weight of the model from imposing itself on your cranium. It’s no gimmick, either. The Arctis 7 remained very comfortable for three-to-four-hour sessions during testing, and beyond that point it was only slight constriction around the ears that emerged. We all have ears of different shapes and sizes, so that’s to be expected from any circumaural cup.
A focus on build quality prevails. The earcups are finished with luxurious soft foam padding of the type you’ll find in Bose and B&O headphones, and they’re affixed to a smart brushed aluminum headband, which sits above the elasticated band. Velour earcups, along with an array of colorful bands, are available separately if you want to go deep into customization.
The other big selling point is lag-free wireless sound. It’s been a tough nut to crack in the gaming headset market for years, although the consumer’s mistrust of anything wireless is disproportionate to the actual drawbacks. SteelSeries delivered a fantastic wireless package with the “H” headset in 2014, but its $300-plus price tag wasn’t to everyone’s tastes. Here, we have a $150 headset that pulls a wireless setup together brilliantly. We’ll admit to raising our eyebrows at the purported 15-hour battery life on the specs sheet, but our testing revealed it to be bang on. We’re dealing with a brand new model out of the box, so it’s likely that charge time will lessen over time, but it’s a strong starting ng point.
RANGE ROVER Its 40-foot range will be enough to keep you entertained while you take a break and head to the refrigerator, and the wireless receiver is small and unobtrusive. Setup is as simple as plugging the receiver in via a USB port, hitting the pair button, and powering up the headset—Win 10 found the drivers right away for us. Get a few cables involved, and you can use the Arctis 7 with your smartphone and consoles, too, which adds some value to that $150 pricing.
All controls are on the headset itself, including a volume scroll wheel, a chat mix wheel, mic mute, and power buttons—the retractable mic sits on the left, and offers crackle-free VOIP. They’re sensibly laid out and easy enough to find by touch, although the mic mute button takes a while to get acquainted with, and we found that at very low volume settings, the left side seems louder—it might be our ears.
We’re very impressed with the Arctis 7, and its benefits are clear and plentiful. However, when it comes to overall sound quality, it’s slightly disappointing. SteelSeries fitted the same 40mm S1 drivers in this model as found in its higherend headsets, but there’s a muddiness here that no amount of preset-tweaking in SteelSeries’s own Engine software can remedy. Good sound means a flat frequency response, which can be boosted to taste, but we weren’t able to flatten it in the Arctis 7. What’s more, the DTS-Headphone X algorithm that often provides a decent soundscape sounds quite narrow. Our regular evening games of Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds got a bit more tense while donning the Arctis 7, as we found it harder to pinpoint footsteps.
This shouldn’t put you off buying this headset, unless you’re an audiophile or a competitive gamer. Everyone else can square away a bit of extra bass, while enjoying a comfortable and stylish wireless gaming setup. –PHIL IWANIUK