SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless

Verdict

The SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless is an excellent gaming headset. It offers one of the most stylish chassis available, alongside immersive, bass-heavy audio and a host of useful extras. While it is expensive and its mic isn’t class-leading, this is otherwise a sublime headset.

Introduction

The SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless is the brand’s top-class headset that, for 2024, has been refreshed and put in an all-new white colourway.

Aesthetics aside, the Arctis Nova Pro Wireless remains a big-spec headset for use with PlayStation, PC and more, coming with stylish looks, its very own base station, active noise cancellation and more. The mega spec headset will cost you a fair bit of wonga, however, coming in at £349.99/$349.99/€379.99.

With that in mind, the SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless is pitted against the likes of the Sony Inzone H9 and Logitech Astro A50 X in terms of the stylish, all-white premium gaming headset market, and it’s going to have to do a lot to earn a place on the list of the best gaming headsets we’ve tested. I’ve been giving it a go to find out.

Design and Features

• Stylish looks
• Versatile connectivity with base station
• Solid battery life

In its all new white colourway, the SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless is a sublime-looking headset with oodles of style. We’re seeing a wider push for white components and peripherals, all in the name of aesthetics, and SteelSeries’ top contender goes the whole hog in offering a modern headset with wider appeal than just den-dwelling gamers.

It epitomises what was right about the wider redesign of the brand’s longstanding Arctis headset lineup a couple of years ago, of which both the original Arctis Nova Pro Wireless and Arctis Nova 7 Wireless were a part. Gone were the blockier, rounded square earcups and in came much more rounded edges with a redesigned, bevelled headband, which looks fantastic.

The Arctis Nova Pro Wireless in white is perhaps the best looking headset I’ve laid eyes on, while that premium price is also backed up with its blend of smooth and weighty plastics, plush earcups and metal accents where warranted.

A weight of 337g means they aren’t too cumbersome on your head, while the deep, soft earcups and classic suspension headband mean the Arctis Nova Pro are especially comfortable for extended periods. Those earcups also have the benefit of offering fantastic passive noise isolation, even without any active noise cancellation enabled.

The Arctis Nova Pro Wireless also has some proper tactile controls on the underside of the earcups, with the left side featuring a tactile volume wheel as well as a dedicated mic mute button, and a power button. The right side is only home to a Bluetooth pairing button, as well as a pairing LED indicator.

Each of the buttons has its own texture or feeling, such as the rounded finish on the power button and the flat mic mute button, which makes it easy to find the one you want without taking the headset off.

Additional software comes in the form of SteelSeries’ excellent Sonar, which is contained within the slick GG suite. It offers a fantastic range of configuration options with its own built-in mixer for you to route different audio streams through, as well as an EQ for game and chat audio, and for the microphone.

It’s also in the Mic tab where you can enable or disable the Arctis Nova Pro Wireless’ Clearcast AI noise cancellation, which I’d experienced previously on the brand’s Alias microphone. There are also a range of EQ presets for different games, as well as for either music, movies or podcasts depending on the type of experience you’d like.

Connectivity is fantastic, with a wide variety of supported platforms. The Arctis Nova Pro Wireless is rated to work for PC and PlayStation, as well as mobile devices, Mac and Nintendo Switch. You get a choice of either 2.4GHz wireless or Bluetooth, with the former handled by a dedicated USB-A powered base station, which is a handy upgrade. The base station allows for two connected devices simultaneously, while you can also connect via Bluetooth, too. I had no trouble connecting the headset with either my Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra, MacBook Pro or Windows gaming PC in testing, and multi-point over either 2.4GHz or Bluetooth is convenient.

The base station is a much more powerful piece of kit on its own than you might anticipate, with it being able to display the likes of volume control as well as battery level at a glance without the need for opening software, as well as offering on-the-fly adjustments for settings such as mic volume, active noise cancellation and for enabling power saving mode. It also allows for the charging of one headset battery while the other is being used, which is mighty impressive.

No other headset I’ve used has swappable batteries, and the fact the Arctis Nova Pro Wireless does is especially clever. It allows for up to 44 hours of charge overall, and replacing one battery with another is simple. They are contained underneath the earcup’s silver accent and to charge or replace one, you pop it out of the slot and slide it into the base station, where it takes 3 hours to charge fully. They also support USB-C quick charge for 3 hours of runtime in a 15-minute charge if you are caught short.

While SteelSeries claims an ‘infinite’ amount of battery, the 44 hours on offer over 2.4GHz wireless solely is easily enough to get through a working week, although using Bluetooth and connecting to multiple devices will see a drop off down to 18 hours per cell. It may not be up to HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless levels of endurance, but the Arctis Nova Pro Wireless is still decent.

The presence of active noise cancellation is a signal of the fact that the Arctis Nova Pro Wireless is a more premium headset, and it does a reasonable job of blocking out noises found in everyday life. However, it isn’t as strong as similarly priced generalist headphones including my beloved Bose Noise Cancelling Headphone 700s, or other wireless headsets such as the AceZone A-Spire.

Audio and Microphone

• Lots of bass
• Immersive audio
• Microphone is quite weak

For a wireless gaming headset at this price, it’s only natural to have high expectations for the SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless’ audio quality. I’m pleased to report that this headset sounds excellent, and make for an engaging listen.

That is largely thanks to their big helping of bass, with a robust low end which makes tracks such as Rush’s YYZ and Working Man such an enjoyable listen. It’s plentiful, but isn’t muddy or overbearing. Such strong bass also helped the Arctis Nova Pro Wireless to provide some fantastic immersion in FPS titles such as Counter Strike 2 during my testing, where it was possible to feel the boom of grenades and gunfire.

The mid-range is rich and detailed too, as detailed in James Taylor’s September Grass, with the track’s smooth vocal and percussion, as well as its classic fingerstyle acoustic guitar. It’s the same story with John Martyn’s May You Never, while Gloria Estefan’s Get On Your Feet displayed precision with its busy percussion and synth notes. The Arctis Nova Pro Wireless handles vocals well, too.

The top-end is arguably the least impressive element of the sound, with some harshness such as with the hi-hat rides and cymbal strikes on The Strokes’ Reptilia and with some particularly harsh percussion elements on Steely Dan’s Do It Again. Of course, all of this is configured with the parametric EQ in SteelSeries’ software, but out of the box, the Arctis Nova Pro Wireless offers some excellent audio, especially with that robust low end.

Its soundstage is reasonably wide for a closed-back set of cans, with the bongos being well off to the right in Earth, Wind & Fire’s September – where they should be. It’s precise too, and picking out enemies in CS 2 was excellent, with good placement of gunshots and enemy shouts. Spatial Audio aided with positioning a little, although I preferred the output without it enabled. For PS5 users, the Arctis Nova Pro Wireless is compatible with Tempest 3D audio.

Unfortunately, the Arctis Nova Pro Wireless’ microphone isn’t as strong as its audio, with a thinner-sounding option that lacks a certain degree of body and overall richness in comparison to other headsets that cost less. A plus point however is the excellent ClearCast AI Noise Cancellation, which did a marvellous job of cancelling out any unwanted noise, especially my deliberately loud mechanical keyboard. It is also retractable, and slots conveniently back into the headset when not in use.

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