How do we test gaming headsets?
You can read all about how PC Gamer tests hardware in our how we test guide, but here’s a quick breakdown of specifically how we test gaming headsets.
Each headset that we test we use as our daily drivers for at least a week, that way we get to experience not just the sound, but what it’s like to use each set of cans on a daily basis.
We test each headset in a number of different game genres—shooters, battle royales, and racing games make for particularly good testing scenarios since the former tends to test the low-end and reveal muddiness and distortion, while Battlefield, PUBG, et al are great for positional audio tracking.
We record a sample of our voice in Audacity and compare it to previous recordings from other models, then head to Discord to get some feedback from our friends on how we’re sounding. You can hear a lot of the microphones and headsets we test on our Soundcloud (I promise it’s not PC Gamer’s homemade rap).
Oh, and we listen to a lot of high-res audio music, obviously. Listening to tracks we know well, that work through the bass, mid-tones, and highs, means we know how they should sound at their best. And if we hear things we’ve never heard before in a familiar track, that normally indicates a pretty damned good headset.