 Buy an unlocked Intel 4th Gen Core i7 or Core i5 processor and get a free copy of Rome 2 Total War. Click now to learn more. Welcome friends to my unboxing and review of the SteelSeries H Wireless. It's a bit of a spoiler alert thing here, so if you don't want to know the results of this video then you better stop watching now. Oh you probably do. Anyway it's the best gaming wireless headset I have ever encountered. So let's start with opening up the box and having a look at what's inside. Now SteelSeries whole thing with this is leg free uninterrupted wireless performance and it really actually is. More on that in the range test. So the first thing we find inside is the H Wireless themselves and then well we'll talk more about those in a moment. Next we find the base station which has a volume knob as well as a button on the front, a back button on the front, an OLED display that's actually quite vibrant, then it has a little battery port and finally on the back analog in, chat out, power in, USB in because it has a built in DAC as well as optical in and optical pass through. Again utilizing the built in DAC. Next up we find all of the cables that you could, oops, possibly need regardless of where you are in the world to hook this baby up to whatever you could possibly want. Now let's start with the construction and the looks of the unit. The materials actually feel very premium and it has a much more subdued aesthetic compared to the recently released Siberia Elites. I think they're targeting the mature gamer I guess. I guess a gamer would have to be at least mature enough to buy these to be earning their own money because at $300 they are really, really expensive but they do look good. In terms of features we'll start with the weight. They come in at around 325 grams which is about the same as the Corsair Vengeance 2100. They feature Dolby Headphone, Dolby Digital and Dolby Pro Logic 2 so you can use whatever virtual surround technology you want although personally I prefer good old fashioned stereo. They have compatibility with pretty much whatever you could possibly want via the analog as well as digital inputs so you've got PC, Mac, Xbox, PlayStation, phone, AV system, whatever you feel like. The one feature that they're touting as a big deal and I actually kind of agree with them is the fact that it has swappable battery packs. So it comes with two of these battery packs as well as a charging port in the base station so you get up to 10 hours with each of them. So let's say that's optimistic and you get up to 8 hours with each of them. What you can do is you can actually charge the other one while you're using the first one and then they charge in a couple hours and you can swap them for virtually unending battery life. I think that's a really cool feature. And then I also think their SharePort feature is really cool as well. Now because these are designed to be used not only in front of a PC but also in a living room and they look like something that might make sense in a living room as more of a multimedia headphone. This is great because you're not necessarily going to have a whole bunch of sets of wireless headphones so now with this little 3.5mm jack down here you can bring someone along for the ride and they can listen to whatever movie it is that you're watching or whatever game you're playing at the same time as you. I think that's really really cool. Now in terms of comfort the H Wireless fits me like a glove. I actually really really like them for this. The headband is a little bit narrower than I would normally like but the very soft foam on the bottom does compensate for this and there's actually that same soft foam on the earcups. You can see it's an extremely slow rebound when you press it in so there isn't really any break in time. They're comfortable right out of the box. The pleather on the earcups is also a couple grades above what you will typically find on cheap commodity headsets and really feels closer to natural leather than again most of the other pleather products that I've encountered. The weight is about the same as the Vengeance 2100 which I think I already said but because that weight is closer to the center, closer to my head instead of being further out I find that they don't slip around when I move my head in the same way that the Vengeance 2100s do. That leads us to our range test. Now I did five different spots and then I used the same setup each time so I actually had a laptop and then the USB dongle connected to the base station in my office. Then I tried the same room so it's about a 10 foot maximum. The other side of the wall I tried down the hallway. I tried the stair landing so coming down onto the next floor. I tried the bathroom on the floor below and then finally I tried the basement so the H wireless performed better than the Vengeance 2100 and the Astro A50s by a long shot in my range test. However, unless you're the kind of person who's going to kind of wander around the house listening to music with your wireless headphones which some people do I suppose that might not be that relevant. Leading into the listening tests I want to talk about the maximum volume very briefly. It didn't get uncomfortably loud or extremely loud. It got about as loud as I would go but it should be noted that the dial on the back which can be used not only to adjust volume but also to adjust settings on the base station here so you can adjust them either here with the knobs and dials or you can configure in here certain settings that you can adjust using the headphones themselves so you don't even have to get up anyway. This is an independent volume control from your Windows system volume if you're using the headphones or headset on a PC. So you could use some software tricks if you wanted to squeeze a little bit more volume out of them but I found 60 to 70 percent was good for day to day music listening or like casual gaming. In terms of noise isolation I really do think that's a strong point for these headphones. The full leather ear cup covering does help with this compared to the cloth covering that is in use by both the Vengeance 2100 and the Astro Ray 50s both of which I was testing at the same time so I could get better context for each of the products. I mean this is important because I hadn't really spent much time with wireless gaming headphones because I don't really care that much about gaming headphones for the most part but more on that anyway in the listening section. The H Wireless is fully driverless on the PC so I was up and running in 15 seconds give or take once I plugged it in. There is a software application that you can use to make adjustments but because this is a console optimized product you can also adjust all the advanced features using the base station or the headphones themselves so you can adjust your general volume, you can adjust your Dolby settings, the relative volume of game sounds and chat sounds compared to each other or there's even a setting to do that dynamically so that as chat transmissions come through your game volume can lower a little bit and your chat volume can increase so you can hear things clearly and you can adjust how much of a shift there is when that happens so that's a pretty cool feature. You can also set up any one of the preset EQ settings or even a custom EQ if you want but the control wasn't very granular and generally speaking I like a fairly flat EQ so I just found myself sticking with mostly flat and adjusting things up a little bit in the mid range. Finally you can adjust your input source because it does have multiple inputs as well as assigned profiles for each of those sources with respect to the EQ, Dolby, chat volume and all that stuff on a source by source basis so it'll remember all that as you switch between different things. Which leads us to the listening tests. They were all performed, all three headsets using the onboard DAC so we used USB connectivity for the best apples to apples comparison and this one I guess I spoiled the surprise a little bit but it really is probably the best gaming headset I've ever heard. It surprised both Brandon and Edsel as well. We all had very low expectations because it is branded as a, see look it's right there in the box, gaming headset and they just tend to not be as good as multimedia headsets but honestly I mean I feel like for an extra hundred dollars over the Siberia Elites which were they were good sounding but they weren't good I mean they were good. These are worth it in terms of audio quality, audio fidelity alone and the fact that they're wireless is just a bonus at that point and I would really consider saving my extra pennies for something like this versus the Siberia Elites because I don't personally need multicolored onboard lights. I mean I appreciate wireless freedom and I appreciate great sound quality but I don't need like 16 point whatever million colors and all that kind of stuff. Now let's talk about sheer audio quality. Bass performance at very very low frequencies so this would be my one criticism you know those frequencies that will tickle your ears and make your head vibrate those may feel a fair bit lacking but I would still say that bass performance is very good. It's tight and it's punchy and it's good for general battlefield ambient sounds and great for listening to music but if you're one of those people that really enjoys that rumble then they might not be quite as appealing to you as they are to me. The mids are also not as strong as some would like but I found that was able to be taken care of with a very small bump to the mid-range using the EQ and I would go through and I would probably set that bump on all of my different inputs. The highs are crisp and clear without being fatiguing to listen to which is a bit of a problem that I tend to have even with good headphones just because my hearing is a little bit more sensitive in that range so I quite enjoyed listening to these but you do have to take all of that what I just said with a grain of salt because while I do have a fair bit of experience with wired audio file grade headphones I don't have any experience with audio file grade wireless headphones so the only thing I could really compare these directly to was other gaming headsets so I mean I guess the pricing is something that doesn't really make sense. Do these sound so much better than something like Audio Technica ATM50s? No probably not. Probably similar but those are a wired headphone and so I don't have the proper context for wireless audio file headphones to know if these are a good value at $300 but what I can compare against is other gaming headsets so the Astro A50s to me are they don't make nearly as much sense they're the same price as the H Wireless they don't really have any features that the H Wireless doesn't have and they just plain don't sound as good and they don't have as good range and all that stuff but where things start to get quite interesting is comparing the H Wireless to the Vengeance 2100s. If you're a strictly PC gamer then a lot of the features of the H Wireless might not make sense for you so what you're getting is you are getting noticeably better sound quality so that is a thing but I don't know if it's a twice as much thing you are getting the swappable battery feature which is really cool because the Vengeance 2100 has a built-in battery and when you run out you tether yourself to your computer using USB and you run it as basically a wired headset. You are getting the varied configurable inputs including console compatibility so it's nice to be able to switch between those the 2100 does not have that strictly a USB dongle for me the comfort was better and the overall feel was more premium but at twice the price it's yeah it's up to you whether you can justify it or not especially considering that the microphone really didn't blow me away on this one it sounds pretty hollow it lacks that that AM radio sound that is typically achievable with a microphone so close to your mouth I'll give you guys a listen to it here. This is my audio test with the microphone on the SteelSeries H Wireless I hope you enjoyed it. I want to talk a little bit about why I feel like with a wireless headphone or headset the built-in microphone is so important compared to with a wired solution because if you have wired headphones even if they have no microphone at all there are many other solutions you can run another wire for a clip-on you can put a mod mic on it you can put a desktop mic on your desk well with wireless the expectation is that you can move away you can leave and so adding another wire is not a reasonable solution in this case so I feel like the the built-in mic has to be good enough and this one's not that great but it's usable it's not staticky or or distorted sounding like the Astro A50s and they do get major points for the retractable mic I hate boom mics I find they get in the way I don't like how they can't easily be adjusted to the very corner of your mouth which is the optimal positioning but it just plain doesn't sound as good as the Vengeance 2100 mic I do like the mute button implementation on this particular headphone though I think I went and turned them off when I meant to turn them on there but anyway you do a quick press of the power button rather than a hold and there's an indicator light that is not bright enough to be distracting but bright enough to be easily visible that shows you whether your mic is transmitting or not so thank you for checking out my unboxing sort of and review of the SteelSeries H wireless don't forget to like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment and let me know are they just off their gourd is $300 just plain too much for a gaming headset or is you know would you be shopping for something like an Astro A50 or something comparable and now would you look at the H wireless and consider it especially given that according to Linus's review anyway it's just plain better in every possible way would love to hear what you guys think about that and last but not least don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos.