What I am about to say will really get under the skin of everyone who has spent their money on a Razer, SteelSeries, or HyperX – your gaming headset is no good. No good in the sense, you’ve invested a good amount into a piece of technology which is now ten years overdue an update and continues to convince you that it deserves a spot on your desk.
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It took me switching entirely to IEMs to finally realize it, but let me tell you a dirty secret of the gaming headset industry – they do just one thing. Audio. That’s all. You aren’t paying your hard earned money for its appearance, its software capabilities or even the little ring of LEDs which illuminates whenever you plug it in. You pay for your gaming headset to help you listen and speak, and according to the sole purpose of its existence, they fail spectacularly at their job.
Take any average gaming headset made in 2015. Use it. Then, take a similar headset from 2025. You will have just witnessed the most disappointing decade of improvements in consumer hardware. The drivers still sound the same. The soundstage is still artificially widened to give the illusion of depth. Virtual surround sound, which companies have been marketing as a unique feature for years and years, still resembles the use of the appropriate reverb effect applied to your game audio. Mic performance still makes you think you’re speaking to the listener through a tunnel.
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Try conducting a similar test with professional-grade headphones. Get a Sennheiser or Audio-Technica model from 2015 and then get a newer one today. You’ll be able to notice a considerable difference in driver technologies, acoustics calibration, comfort, material performance. That’s what engineering progress during ten years should look like.
Gaming headsets haven’t achieved anything close to it. Instead, they’ve managed to improve the software ecosystem around equalizer presets you’ll ever use once and lighting capabilities.
The thing that really tipped me off, and I mean this honestly, is that esports pros – those very pros these gaming headsets have been designed specifically around – don’t even use these devices for any audio purposes. They use IEMs underneath. The gaming headset sitting on their head is a prop. It is for the sponsor logo and the boom mic. The audio these pros hear through their ears is being delivered through a pair of in-ear monitors. All of this is a marketing gimmick, and we all bought into it.
Not only that, but the final argument in favor of choosing gaming headsets over everything else is completely baseless too. While a cheap gaming headset with an attached mic boom might serve well as a microphone when compared to some other headset without one, a good quality clip-on mic purchased separately would give better results for voice capture than most gaming headset microphones on the market today. I know it, because I use it myself and nobody on my entire team has made a single complaint about it.
The more I use IEMs with an additional mic setup, the more I think that this is something that came about purely based on marketing’s success in convincing an entire generation of gamers that there had to be a gaming vertical for audio because everything else already had one. Just look at gaming chairs. Gaming desks. Even gaming eyedrops, and yes, those exist and were purchased by someone.
Put your money where your mouth isn’t and get yourself a decent set of headphones or IEMs, and a clip-on mic. You’ll feel the difference in your ears. Your team will feel the difference too. The only thing that will not notice is the RGB, because it was never paying attention to begin with.
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