The Best Gaming Headsets, Tested By Avid Gamers

The best gaming headsets give you detailed spatial audio with high-quality sound effects, allow you to hear your teammates’ voices more clearly and help immerse you in your game. Because there are so many options on the market, I put 17 headsets through hours of gaming to see which ones are worth the investment. After hours of gameplay and streaming, I picked the Steelseries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless as the best overall winner, thanks to its superb comfort and well-balanced sound. However, it’s not the only favorite.

While audio quality is most important, there are tons of important considerations when buying a gaming headset, including comfort, software features and battery life. I closely evaluated all of these factors during my testing and gauged each headset’s performance. Below, see the six best gaming headsets I found after extensive testing. And for more upgrades to your gaming setup, check out our guides on the best gaming keyboards and the best Xbox controllers.

Best for:

• Excellent comfort
• Great audio quality
• Compatibility across gaming systems

Skip if:

• You want top-tier noise cancellation

When I first set up the Steelseries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless, what stood out to me was its outstanding versatility across gaming systems and connection types. This model backs up its versatility with terrific, well-balanced sound and a comfortable design. It excels across all these areas, which is why I chose it as the best gaming headset overall.

From the outside, the Steelseries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless stands out for its stylish and functional design, even though it lacks the bright colors or RGB highlights of some of its competitors. It has a retractable microphone that perfectly blends in with the headset’s left ear cup, allowing you to hide it when you’re not using it and pull it out to use as needed. The left ear cup has an easy-to-reach volume wheel and a power button—all of which were very easy to distinguish by touch. The right ear cup has a Bluetooth button.

I found this headset extremely comfortable to wear through hours of gameplay. It’s lightweight with an elastic headband that fits well on any head size or shape. It also has plush over-ear ear cups and a soft-touch faux-leather covering. I noticed the ear cups felt slightly warm after long gaming sessions, but not enough so to cause discomfort. Plus, it’s very common for headsets to feel a little warm after hours of gaming.

The Steelseries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless headset outputs stellar audio, too. During my gaming sessions, the headset produced excellent frequency response, with enough bass for most situations and good clarity and detail in the high end to provide an exciting, immersive gaming experience. It’s not the single best-sounding gaming headset I tested, though: The Master & Dynamic MG20 delivers a little extra sparkle in the high frequencies, but the Steelseries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless gets very close.

The biggest problem I had with the audio quality had to do with the noise cancellation. It succeeded at cutting out some outside noise and hum, but it doesn’t match the noise cancellation on noise canceling headphones like the Apple AirPods Max and Bose QuietComfort Ultra. This is common—especially since gaming headset manufacturers more often build products that will stay in your home, rather than be used out and about.

The Arctis Nova Pro Wireless is the only headset I tested with a hot-swappable battery (included in the box), an uncommon feature in headsets today and useful considering the headset’s battery life over 2.4 GHz wireless is a little below average. All this to say, the SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless is the clear pick for the best gaming headset overall—see my full review for more details. If you aren’t feeling the black color, the company just launched the headset in white, too.

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Best for:

• A highly comfortable—and more affordable—fit
• Super versatile connectivity

Skip if:

• You want noise cancellation
• You’re looking for a massive battery life

It’s kind of the Steelseries show here, but for good reason. A step down from the Steelseries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless is the Steelseries Arctis Nova 7 Wireless—and its variants, the Arctis Nova 7P Wireless and Arctis Nova 7X Wireless.

To clarify the variations, the Arctis Nova 7P Wireless is built for PlayStation, but it’ll also work on the PC and Nintendo Switch wirelessly, and with the Xbox through a normal wired connection. The Arctis Nova 7X Wireless has the Xbox security chip, and you’ll be able to use it wirelessly on any platform, but on PlayStation you won’t be able to control game/chat mix straight from the headset. The Nova 7 works with everything except Xbox. It has the Chatmix dial, and doesn’t have the PlayStation 5 sidetone dial, which is specific to the 7P, but the Sidetone can be controlled in the PlayStation 5 software. It’s a little confusing, admittedly, but the setup is designed so you can get the most out of your gaming.

Regardless of the model you go for, you’ll get an excellent gaming headset experience overall. Steelseries has really nailed the comfort of its gaming headsets, and like the Arctis Nova Pro Wireless, the Arctis Nova 7 Wireless is lightweight, with plush padding in the ear cup, and the ski-goggle headband that Steelseries headsets have become synonymous with. I was able to wear the Arctis Nova 7 Wireless for hours without them feeling uncomfortable.

The headset is sleek and stylish. It’s built mostly from plastic, but it’s a strong-feeling matte plastic, and the ear cups are slimmer than many alternative headsets. The headset has magnetic plates that can be switched out for a little extra customizability with a booster pack—though I suspect most will simply use those that come pre-installed on the headset.

It’s feature-packed, too. The headset wirelessly connects to the platforms that the particular model supports, plus it has Bluetooth for use with a mobile device or other devices you want to use it with. You can even use 2.4GHz and Bluetooth simultaneously, if you want, which is a neat way to listen to music while you’re gaming, for example. As a last resort, it can be used through a wired connection. It doesn’t have noise cancellation like the Arctis Nova Pro Wireless, but very few gaming headsets in general do. If you don’t mind the lack of ANC, you could easily use the headset as a general-purpose pair of headphones that you also use to game with.

The battery life is rated by Steelseries as lasting up to 38 hours, which is only fine in a world with headsets that last up to 300 hours. Battery life in general seems to be Steelseries’ Achilles heel. Sure, asking for 300 hours of charge, like that of the HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless, might be a little demanding, but plenty of Steelseries’ competitors reach 50 hours or more. The Turtle Beach Atlas Air, for example, was in contention for this category, and it hits 50 hours.