Linus tech tips coverage of pax 2013 is brought to you by western digital Intel
and steel series so we're here at the steel series booth
at pax prime 2013. Dan raiden the
director of audio products steel series is going to be at least modeling the
siberia elite so this is the i mean this is the most premium headset you guys
have ever built this is really the finest
steel series headset in our company's history we really wanted to take everything that we learned in the 10
years of siberia and bring it to a better quality of
audio a better quality feel in your hands better quality materials better
isolation better software control just a better gaming experience with every
aspect related to audio all right so the off okay let's walk you through it
physically here guys so first of all is the
bands have been replaced instead of using a plastic lightweight band you've
gone with a thin steel band that actually gives it a much more rigid feel
that traditional siberia suspension system that means no adjustment every
time you put it on is still present the ear cups have been replaced completely
with these extremely large plush ear cups and what these also serve to do is
hold the headphones a little bit further away from your ear so the drivers are
not right up against your ear this is going to act as a bit of a a cushion
zone or buffer zone that makes the audio sound more natural now in terms of style
the lighting is one of the more interesting things about the siberia
elite here so this one is running just red however i have another siberia elite
right here this is the black version so it's available in black and white to
start and you can put any of 16.8 million colors on those little light
bands on the side which is extremely
customizable as far as headphones go now that won't work guys remember if you're
plugged in via analog but the good news is is siberia elite can be plugged in
pretty much however you want so why the approach to flexibility rather than
offering two skus like you've done in the past well we really see that gaming
is moving to a couple of different places one being our heritage is pc
gaming and we're not abandoning that but we also want to acknowledge that people
are playing games everywhere you know i live in new york city i'm on the subway
i see people playing games on their phone on their tablet i talked to people
where our company's headquarters is in chicago and all their kids are playing
games in the back seat of the car on the ipad so we wanted all of our
newest latest greatest products to work with not only pc not only mac but also
the future of platforms and that is mobile
and so in terms of the the software implementation of that it comes with a
usb sound card or you can plug it into whatever analog connection you want but
you guys have worked a lot of stuff into the new steel series engine three that's
different from before what do you guys got in there so steelseries engine three
is our new software suite that helps you optimize the performance of any steel
series enabled device so this not only works with siberia elite it also works
with our new 9h tournament gaming headset it works with some of our mice
some of our keyboards and the the goal really is so to have an entire ecosystem
of connected gaming peripherals what it does for audio specifically is it gives
you a great looking easy to use interface for everything from loading
game specific eq presets to customizing
the performance of dolby surround sound to mic auto gain to mic compression to
noise reduction in the background to
customizing the led so you can have not
only all those colors but you can also have them do different things you can have them turn on and off you can have
them color shift as you saw on that black one you can have them respond to
game events so if there's an explosion in the game you can have an explosion in
your headset so if you're on a voice on a voip kind of uh chat
scenario your teammates could see you just got blew up
very very cool so tell me about the microphone the microphone is our largest
directional gooseneck that we've ever done and our size does matter folks
absolutely now siberia 10 years ago introduced the
retractable gooseneck microphone to gamers and what that does
is it allows you to get the mic closer to where you want it in the center or
side of your mouth the closer the mic is to your mouth the more you get of what's
called proximity effect and basically that means you get a better quality of
speech sound it's retractable so because we're moving
to more mobile if you want to use it for voice calls and you're on the street and you don't want to pull it out you can
still use it retracted but this gooseneck allows you to get the mic
where you want it and also see when your mic is muted because you
get this illumination now we've got the tournament grade
headset that you alluded to before this is the 9h so this would be the highest
end tournament headset that you've ever released as well
walk me through it that's right so the h series is really where we come from and
and i like to think of h as being our heritage h standing for heritage which
is tournament gaming that's kind of where we made our name
the 9h is the finest h series headset we've ever made now what's cool about
the 9h is not only does it include the next generation steel series proprietary
speaker drivers like we saw in the siberia elite but it also includes our
first ever double enclosure ear cup so what that means is like when you build a
recording studio you build a room and you build another room inside it so you
get great isolation the noise doesn't leak out of the studio that's what these
ear cups are these are double enclosure ear cups so you put them on in a noisy
tournament setting it blocks out a lot of the outside noise
this also has our first fully retractable microphone so you push in it
pops out same gooseneck as on on our siberia and
other h-series headsets but this one really gets the mic exactly where you
want it right in front of you you address it from the front and this also
has our steel series engine 3 software so you can have all of
that fancy customization and noise rejection all those features that will
help you be heard better in tournament settings that are noisy
so in terms of comfort what have you guys done with this because i mean
siberia is all about comfort but the reality of it is if you build a headset
that's not comfortable then you might as well just fold up and close just close
your shop now i think you're right about that so
just like our siberia elite these ear cups are over padded with memory foam so
they conform to the shape of your ears and the way that you your head wants
them to fit we also have memory foam in the headband this is a new headband
designed for us very flexible um
this is not the final look but it's going to be a very attractive headband
we wanted to show this to the gamers at pax because we thought it was important
for everybody to see where we're going that despite the fact that we've
introduced some mobile headsets in the last few years we've done some different
things in different areas we still want everyone to know that we're focused on
the tournament gamer because that's where we come from
speaking of that one of the other features that tournament gamers i think
will appreciate is a detachable cable
the other end of the detachable cable which by the way is double fabric
braided is a volume mute control
and that same steel series micro connector which is our custom eight pin
connector that we use on the usb sound card as well as on connectors for
mobile exactly the flux in ear pro as well yeah
and then we and then we allow you to connect either to your pc with the dual
connectors or mobile with the single connector or mac so that gives us a nice
robust rugged connection physically and
also allows us to send a lot of data between the headset and the computer
awesome thank you very much it's been a total pleasure having you walk us
through these guys remember our trip to pax prime 2013 is powered by western
digital Intel and steel series so big thanks to you guys
for making it even possible for us to be here thanks a lot thanks for having us