Steelseries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless Review – The Best Gaming Headset!

The Steelseries Arctis NOVA Pro Wireless is quite possibly the best gaming headset on the market. It commands a high end price tag that many would rightfully scoff at – and audiophiles would lose their minds over – but if pristine audio quality isn’t your absolute highest priority, you’re in for one stunning package with these. They really do (almost) everything right. Let me explain.

The NOVA Pro Wireless has a lot of tricks up its sleeve, starting with what’s under these side covers. Yep, you are seeing that right, a removable battery! This makes so much sense, yet so few offer it. Now a single removable battery isn’t all that useful in-and-of-itself, which is why Steelseries includes a second battery with the headset, and why there’s a battery shaped hole on the right side of the base station. Just push it in and clip it down and as if by magic the spare battery will start charging with either of the USB C connections connected. Then you can just swap between them in a few seconds and be back in the game. It’s amazing. What’s even more amazing is you can buy replacement batteries from Steelseries for a very reasonable £18 for two more batteries. How great is that!

You might have heard me just say two USB C inputs – and yep that’s right, there’s two. There’s actually a line in and line out as well, but at least one USB C needs to be connected for the base station to power on. The idea here is to have both your PC and say your playstation or Nintendo switch connected, then you can switch between them either with the rather premium feeling dial on the base station, or the volume slider on the headset. Of course if you want to connect this via a cable instead, there’s a 4 pole cable included in the box.

As if that wasn’t enough connectivity, the headset also has Bluetooth support. But, not just Bluetooth to the box then proprietary wireless to the headset, no the headset itself is what connects. But that’s not all either – see most devices that support both 2.4GHz wireless and Bluetooth like my Logitech MX Master mice have to connect to one or the other. Not the NOVA Pro Wireless. This will happily connect to BOTH a Bluetooth device AND the 2.4GHz connection to the base station. That means you can be chatting to your friends on Discord via your phone, while playing on your switch, playstation or even PC, all while still hearing the in-game audio. Want to listen to music from your phone while gaming or on a boring Zoom call? No problem! The Bluetooth function is a fully separate system, so you can use these out and about if you wanted via Bluetooth, then let them connect to your gaming machine when you get home. 

Now not to burst this hype train bubble too soon, but I should note that because it seems like there are two separate systems in the headset, it seems like they end up fighting each other sometimes. I’ve had to pop the battery out to reset them quite a few times as they get themselves into a locked out state where Bluetooth won’t turn on, 2.4GHz won’t turn on, or an interesting mix somewhere between. They share control of the buttons, so if they are only connected with Bluetooth then the volume wheel will control Bluetooth volume. If it’s connected to the base station then it will only control 2.4GHz volume. 

What might surprise you is that these have pretty decent active noise cancellation. They have two microphones on the top of the ear cups which capture the outside noise which then gets cancelled out. It isn’t as good you might find from someone like Sony or Apple, but it’s certainly good enough for regular use. When you add the ANC and Bluetooth support together, you start to realise these aren’t just a gaming headset – Steelseries wants you to use these as your travelling headphones AS WELL AS your gaming headset. Considering their fairly sleek, subtle design, they’d fit right in among the collection of over-ear style headphones many already use. Add to that the removable batteries and it sure looks like this is one hell of a headset! 

Of course, all of that functionality is somewhat mute if the headset sucks, but I’m happy to say that it doesn’t. To set your expectations properly, you shouldn’t compare this to a £300 pair of what you might call “proper” headphones like Sony’s WH-1000’s. If you compare this to other gaming headsets though, it’s pretty good. You have options for equaliser profiles on the base station – the “GAMEDAC” – including a custom EQ profile. I found the flat profile to be, well, a little flat. The smiley profile generally sounded better for music, although made speech difficult to listen to on YouTube videos. The bass boost mode did sound a little more punchy for heavier music and games, although I mostly just left it on flat as that ended up being the best all-rounder. To less discerning ears, these sound great, but they are far from audiophile grade. For gaming I found them to be a great fit. They’ve got the right balance of bass and treble to mix things like gunshots and footsteps together without sounding too harsh. Even without fake 3D software they have great directionality and were a helpful companion while gaming.

[Mic test]

Of course the mic is an important part of any gaming headset, and this one sounds… fine. It’s fine. It’s not amazing and still very much sounds like a gaming headset mic with the sort of tin-can effect, but it is still clear enough to just chat to your mates with. It’s really not too bad, although it’s pretty far from broadcast grade!

One of the other deciding factors in what gaming headset to buy is comfort. I can’t tell you if this will be comfortable on your head, but what I can tell you about is the design and my own experiences and I’ll let you infer from that. The NOVA Pro Wireless has a decent amount of adjustment – each earcup slides out from the headband for overall head size adjustment. Steelseries always use this ski goggle band as the cushion, and it works. You can even adjust it out or in for extra tightness or a bit more room. The cups themselves both swivel to match your head – or lay flat when you don’t have them on – and tilt at least a little. The cups are relatively small for over-ears, they do still fit over my reasonably large ears, but not all that comfortably for me. I’m 6ft and have a bit of a big head – both in ego and physically – so you can base your sizing on that. The outer edge of my ears rub on the inside of the ear cups, which was a little irritating for me personally. I also found the clamping pressure was just a little too tight for my liking, but the ski goggle band adjustment helped with that one. 

The ear cup cushions are vinyl all around, which I’m sure will disintegrate in time like every other vinyl thing I’ve ever had. They do have ample padding beneath them though, and do a remarkable job at cutting out sound all around you before you even think about active noise cancelling. The good news on the ear cups is that you can buy replacement ones from Steelseries as well, which means you can expect this thing to actually last long. That’s not something that many headsets can offer, and with a premium feeling build quality like this, I’d imagine these will hold out for years to come. 

Of course, when connected to a PC you’ll be prompted to install the Steelseries Engine software. Surprisingly that doesn’t give you much more functionality than what you’ll find on the built in display and menu system. The only extra feature I found was what to do with bluetooth calls – you can have the headset mute or lower the volume of your in game audio while on a bluetooth call – or do nothing. That’s pretty cool!

On the whole then, I’d say the NOVA Pro Wireless is one interesting bit of kit. The fact it can quite comfortably have dual purposes without looking out of place doing either is pretty compelling. It isn’t the absolute best sounding headset – both listening and talking – but I’d still say it’s above average in the gaming headset market at least. Of course if you had £330 to spend on some headphones, you could get the last generation Sony headphones and still have around £100 to spend on a gaming headset, but if you want something that can do both AND has freaking removable batteries, this seems like an awesome choice. I really like it, but those are my thoughts, so I’d love to hear what you think down in the comments below!