No Nonsense Review – Steelseries ARCTIS NOVA 1 Gaming Headset Review

Let’s save both of our time and get straight to the point. This is the Steelseries ARCTIS NOVA 1, their cheapest gaming headset. It’s not a properly cheap headset though, coming in at £60 or $60, which matches Corsair’s HS60 Pro right now. Inside the box you get this actually pretty premium sticker pack, the headset itself, a semi-proprietary 5 pole to 4 pole cable and a 4 pole to mic and headphone splitter cable.

The headset is almost exclusively plastic, save for the typical for Steelseries ski goggle headband. You get plenty of adjustment, both on the band itself offering three holes and two pegs per side to adjust the tightness, sliding ear cup height adjustment, rotation to fit your head or sit flat in a bag, and swivel on the ear cups too again to fit your head well.

The ear cups use their “AirWeave” fabric on top of memory foam. Unlike many headsets, even out the box this one felt great. It was instantly comfortable, the clamping pressure wasn’t too tight, and sits nicely on my head. A long gaming session felt pretty good – the whole “AirWeave” thing does feel nice on my head but as with every headset I’ve used it still gets toasty and sweaty in there in a hot room.

As for the audio quality, it’s pretty much what you’d expect for a low to mid priced headset. It’s certainly good enough to chill with some music, watch your favourite tech videos, and of course, game. It’s far from perfect, it sounds a little compressed of course with a bit of emphasis on the bass over treble, but I’m not sure you’ll find much different in the gaming headset market. For gaming it has the right punch to make footsteps and gunshots clear enough, with good left and right distinction to help you know where to run and hide.

The mic is retractable which I prefer over the detachable options from people like Corsair, although it doesn’t quite reach to in front of my mouth. That’s a good thing though because it doesn’t come with a wind sock so the plosive P sounds do make it through occasionally. The mic also has a whole lot of white noise, although the actual quality is pretty good. It’s not perfect for sure, but I can’t be mad.

As for hardware controls, you get a fixed volume wheel on the back of the left cup which is independent of whatever volume your devices are outputting to it, alongside a microphone mute switch. That latches out for off and in for on so you can feel the difference. You can also see an orange ring on the button itself if the mic is muted.

So, for £60 or $60 I’d say it’s a good shout. There are cheaper – Corsair’s HS35 is more like £40 – but this does feel a touch more premium. A slight bit better in every aspect. It feels well built enough to hold up for a fair while. The use of a 5 pole headphone jack on the headset seems a little anti-consumer as it means if you break the cable you’ll have to hope Steelseries will sell you a replacement rather than using any standard 4 pole cable. Still, the quality is good, the listening experience is decent enough, I’ll leave the mic up to you, so yeah. Not bad.