Arctis Nova 3P Wireless

Looking for some help picking out a pair of wired, over-ear headphones (preferably in white). Budget’s around \~220BGN (\~$131.29). I want something with a balanced sound but still some nice punchy bass - good for both music and gaming. Don’t need crazy noise canceling, just a bit of isolation for home use in a quiet room. I used to have the Arctis Nova 3 Wireless, but the 2.4 GHz dongle kept causing popping at low frequencies. Tried everything to fix it, no luck, so I returned them. Now I’d rather stick to wired to avoid that headache again. Any solid recommendations would be very appreciated

SteelSeries Arctis Nova 3P Wireless. Under $100 and good audio and microphone capabilities with Bluetooth and 2.4 audio modes

What about SteelSeries? Their Arctis Nova 3 are my favourites, and they are also European. They should be on that list! :D

I'm having a great time with the steelseries arctis nova 3's, on amazon i got them on sale for about 75quid, only thing i'm not a fan of is the software, extra bloatware, its not great and the software to mix game and chat volume and master volume is all seperate, however if you don't have the software open the chat and gaming still override the master volume, meaning you have to disable the other 2 everytime you boot your pc

Simultaneous audio is a real game changer. I play on a PS5 Pro, and I used to avoid mixing game audio with music because it felt distracting. However, I found it incredibly useful to play games while listening to podcasts or watching YouTube. Recently, while playing Arc Raiders, I often watch YouTube videos for loot directions. With simultaneous audio, I can hear the game, a YouTube video, and communicate with my teammates at the same time; all clearly and without issues on my SteelSeries headset. I was interested in the Audeze Maxwell 2, but I can’t give up simultaneous audio. It’s a huge quality of life feature, one of those things you don’t fully appreciate until you experience it. I watched several reviews of the Audeze Maxwell 2, and it seems you can sort of use simultaneous audio but not when using the microphone. Simultaneous audio stops working as soon as you communicate with teammates in game or answer a call via Bluetooth. Hopefully, this can be fixed with a software update, but if that were possible, it raises the question of why the same issue wasn’t resolved on the original Maxwell.

Stop it. Yes, the Audeze Maxwell sounds better, but the SteelSeries does not sound like 💩. I’ve also seen people say the Maxwell sounds terrible and has a bad mic compared to some more expensive wired gaming headsets. I think we’d both agree that many people are willing to trade a bit of sound quality for quality of life features like wireless gaming. That’s the same way some people feel about simultaneous audio. I probably wouldn’t use simultaneous audio while playing a AAA, story driven game, but I absolutely would for an extraction shooter or while exploring an open world game. There’s so much content today and so little time to enjoy it. Being able to play a game while listening to a new podcast or a stream is a big plus for me. I understand where you’re coming from regarding immersive sound. I felt the same way until I actually experienced it. In the end, it comes down to implementation. SteelSeries does it well enough that you can genuinely enjoy simultaneous audio. People asking for this feature aren’t dumb. Honestly, I think simultaneous audio is a more valuable feature than ANC. The Maxwell is a gaming headset that will mostly be used in a stationary setup. When you’re stationary, it’s much easier to control your environment and deal with background noise. ANC matters far more when you’re mobile or on a plane, which really isn’t the main use case for gaming headsets.

Long time audio enthusiast here who also happens to work for one of the major brands of gaming headsets and microphones (as a test engineer), as well as a former test engineer for [AEA Ribbon Mics](https://aearibbonmics.com/) (high-end studio ribbon mics) so I've got plenty of experience in all of these. Hi-Fi and professional products will almost always outperform gaming ones. And regarding separate components, that's actually a classic in audio products. The higher-end you get, the more you tend to separate out components. Amplifiers are a great example of this. Receivers by-definition are a preamp, power amp, and tuner built into a single chassis. As you move up, you start separating things out. First the tuner (leaving you with an integrated amplifier + separate tuner), then the preamp and power amp, and then you can even get into the very high-end, where you end up with separate power amplifiers per channel. Despite getting less functionality, these separates actually tend to cost considerably more because they're usually built for considerably higher-end performance. This isn't to say that decent quality gaming audio products don't exist. Gaming headsets have come a long way in the last decade. They used to pretty much be universal garbage, but there are some very decent ones now. I'd say the HyperX Cloud II is the first decent one I can think of (go figure, it was essentially Hi-Fi headphone from a major ODM with a boom mic). The Steelseries Arctis Nova products have generally been pretty good for gaming headsets from my experience. I also think you might be under-estimating what "high end" audio is. Audio gear has an insane price range, with many types of products having a range of below $100, to over $10,000, or even $100,000 (yes, that is per component, not an entire setup). Obviously that's getting into extreme/boutique gear, way past the point of diminishing returns, and not at all what I would recommend for you, but it makes the point that a lot of people don't realize just how insanely expensive high-end audio can get. So with that said, you really need to set a budget. Right now, we have no way of determining how "high-end" you can afford and what might be a good fit for you. For wired vs wireless, wired has more potential if it has a standard passive analog input (because this allows you to connect to external headphone amplifiers and DACs). Note that I said potential. You could plug wired equipment into the most garbage of integrated audio to a $1000+ headphone amp. The performance of a modern wireless gaming headset (which will use a proprietary 2.4 GHz dongle) and a wired USB-only gaming headset will be about the same (assuming that we are talking identical products otherwise). By USB-only, I mean a gaming headset that does not have a detachable USB dongle (if the dongle can be unplugged, then you can usually just use the 3.5mm connection with whatever gear you want, just like a passive Hi-Fi headphone). Surround sound doesn't come from a headphone (for the most part). It comes from DSP (though to be fair, this can be built into a gaming headset). better virtual surround sound solutions will take in multichannel data which tends to work better than just taking in 2 channels and trying to "expand" that into surround sound. Above all, I wouldn't worry too much about this in your headphone purchasing decision. You can buy solutions like Dolby Atmos with Headphones and DTS Headphone:X to gain virtual surround sound capabilities. On the microphone side, there are a number of options. "High-end" would be XLR, which also requires a [USB audio interface](https://www.sweetwater.com/c695--USB_Audio_Interfaces). I'd look into broadcast-style (more of a form factor than a performance thing) dynamic microphones for home use. Going the XLR route will age well since professional microphones don't really age-out (for the most part). Audio interfaces also tend to last a very long time. You have to deal with that initial price barrier of entry though. I'd say that you want a minimum of $200 just for your microphone setup if you want to consider XLR. If that's not an option (or worth it, especially just for something like chatting with friends), then I'd go with a decent USB microphone instead. Now, I want to point something out about microphones that a lot of people new to them don't realize: it's not just about the microphone itself but how you set it up and use it. Microphones are heavily affected by their environments and microphone technique is a thing. If you do get a standalone microphone, save some budget for a microphone arm or stand that allows you to get the microphone close to you (around 6" or so is good). From the microphone's perspective, getting closer to the mic improves the ratio of what you want to pickup (your voice) vs what you don't want to pickup (pretty much everything else). Additionally, when you get close to the mic, you can lower the sensitivity (by lowering the gain), which works in-tandem with this better ratio to help you keep your background noise down. To put this simply, if you give a professional recording engineer a cheap but good mic (like a Shure SM57) and someone who has no idea what they're doing a high-end mic (like a vintage Neumann U 47, which will often cost over $20,000), there's a good chance the recording engineer with the SM57 is going to get better results. Ultimately, I'm happy to help give you product suggestions, but there isn't enough information here yet to do so. You've got to give us some kind of budget (approximate is fine). Also, if wireless is a must, you basically have to go with a gaming headset. Bluetooth is not a good choice for gaming due to its latency. Even if you do go with a gaming headset, you can still get an external microphone if you'd like (but do note that you can only monitor your microphone in real time by connecting directly to it or your interface if you get an XLR mic, which requires an analog connection, meaning that this won't work with the majority of wireless gaming headset).

The original Arctis definitely had a weak point at the hinge. However the newer Arctis Nova has redesigned the hinge and it has been great for about 5 years now.