Microphone Performance

The noise-canceling microphone of the Sennheiser GSP 600 was tested by connecting it to the ASUS ROG MAXIMUS IX Code motherboard. It uses an integrated sound card with the S1220 audio codec, including a number of software tweaks for suppressing ambient noise and adding various effects. All of this has been turned off for this test in order to obtain the microphone's raw, unmodified sound. I also used an external USB sound card, Creative's cheap Sound Blaster E1 ($50), and again turned off all the software features that could affect the sound of the microphone.

To review the microphone's sound for a comparison to similar headsets, I used the Adam A7X speakers and Shure SRH840 headphones, both being studio monitors, connected to Audiolab's M-DAC, a high-quality digital-to-analog converter that functions as an external sound card when connected to a PC. Testing was done in Discord, TeamSpeak, Skype, and Audacity, and I also used Audacity to record sound from the microphones. The sound was recorded with microphone sensitivity set to 100% and was not post-processed or edited in any way.

For reference, this voice recording has been made with the Rode NT-USB, a high-quality studio microphone:



This is the sound recorded by using the microphone the Sennheiser GSP 600 is supplied with:




Declaring the microphone of the GSP 600 as anything but excellent would be a mistake even though it isn't necessarily the very best microphone Sennheiser has ever built into a gaming headset—that of the Game One still sounds more natural to me. As you can hear, my voice has a good amount of depth, it's clear and no excessive compression is present. This microphone can safely be used not only for Discord and in-game voice chat, but for streaming and other more demanding tasks.

For comparison, here are microphone samples of a couple of other gaming headsets. I also threw in a V-Moda BoomPro sample, which is a terrific $30 microphone that can be attached to any pair of headphones with a detachable cable (and a 3.5-mm port). The Game One's microphone sounds a bit airier, like it's doing a bit less noise cancellation in the background. Other than that, the microphone of the GSP 600 is up there with the best of them.