Steelseries Siberia Elite & 9H Gaming Headsets - PAX Prime 2013
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,603 words · ~8 min read
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Linus tech tips coverage of pax 2013 is brought to you by western digital Intel
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and steel series so we're here at the steel series booth
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at pax prime 2013. Dan raiden the
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director of audio products steel series is going to be at least modeling the
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siberia elite so this is the i mean this is the most premium headset you guys
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have ever built this is really the finest
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steel series headset in our company's history we really wanted to take everything that we learned in the 10
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years of siberia and bring it to a better quality of
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audio a better quality feel in your hands better quality materials better
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isolation better software control just a better gaming experience with every
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aspect related to audio all right so the off okay let's walk you through it
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physically here guys so first of all is the
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bands have been replaced instead of using a plastic lightweight band you've
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gone with a thin steel band that actually gives it a much more rigid feel
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that traditional siberia suspension system that means no adjustment every
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time you put it on is still present the ear cups have been replaced completely
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with these extremely large plush ear cups and what these also serve to do is
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hold the headphones a little bit further away from your ear so the drivers are
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not right up against your ear this is going to act as a bit of a a cushion
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zone or buffer zone that makes the audio sound more natural now in terms of style
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the lighting is one of the more interesting things about the siberia
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elite here so this one is running just red however i have another siberia elite
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right here this is the black version so it's available in black and white to
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start and you can put any of 16.8 million colors on those little light
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bands on the side which is extremely
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customizable as far as headphones go now that won't work guys remember if you're
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plugged in via analog but the good news is is siberia elite can be plugged in
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pretty much however you want so why the approach to flexibility rather than
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offering two skus like you've done in the past well we really see that gaming
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is moving to a couple of different places one being our heritage is pc
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gaming and we're not abandoning that but we also want to acknowledge that people
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are playing games everywhere you know i live in new york city i'm on the subway
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i see people playing games on their phone on their tablet i talked to people
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where our company's headquarters is in chicago and all their kids are playing
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games in the back seat of the car on the ipad so we wanted all of our
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newest latest greatest products to work with not only pc not only mac but also
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the future of platforms and that is mobile
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and so in terms of the the software implementation of that it comes with a
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usb sound card or you can plug it into whatever analog connection you want but
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you guys have worked a lot of stuff into the new steel series engine three that's
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different from before what do you guys got in there so steelseries engine three
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is our new software suite that helps you optimize the performance of any steel
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series enabled device so this not only works with siberia elite it also works
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with our new 9h tournament gaming headset it works with some of our mice
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some of our keyboards and the the goal really is so to have an entire ecosystem
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of connected gaming peripherals what it does for audio specifically is it gives
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you a great looking easy to use interface for everything from loading
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game specific eq presets to customizing
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the performance of dolby surround sound to mic auto gain to mic compression to
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noise reduction in the background to
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customizing the led so you can have not
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only all those colors but you can also have them do different things you can have them turn on and off you can have
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them color shift as you saw on that black one you can have them respond to
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game events so if there's an explosion in the game you can have an explosion in
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your headset so if you're on a voice on a voip kind of uh chat
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scenario your teammates could see you just got blew up
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very very cool so tell me about the microphone the microphone is our largest
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directional gooseneck that we've ever done and our size does matter folks
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absolutely now siberia 10 years ago introduced the
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retractable gooseneck microphone to gamers and what that does
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is it allows you to get the mic closer to where you want it in the center or
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side of your mouth the closer the mic is to your mouth the more you get of what's
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called proximity effect and basically that means you get a better quality of
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speech sound it's retractable so because we're moving
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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
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still use it retracted but this gooseneck allows you to get the mic
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where you want it and also see when your mic is muted because you
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get this illumination now we've got the tournament grade
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headset that you alluded to before this is the 9h so this would be the highest
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end tournament headset that you've ever released as well
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walk me through it that's right so the h series is really where we come from and
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and i like to think of h as being our heritage h standing for heritage which
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is tournament gaming that's kind of where we made our name
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the 9h is the finest h series headset we've ever made now what's cool about
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the 9h is not only does it include the next generation steel series proprietary
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speaker drivers like we saw in the siberia elite but it also includes our
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first ever double enclosure ear cup so what that means is like when you build a
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recording studio you build a room and you build another room inside it so you
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get great isolation the noise doesn't leak out of the studio that's what these
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ear cups are these are double enclosure ear cups so you put them on in a noisy
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tournament setting it blocks out a lot of the outside noise
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this also has our first fully retractable microphone so you push in it
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pops out same gooseneck as on on our siberia and
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other h-series headsets but this one really gets the mic exactly where you
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want it right in front of you you address it from the front and this also
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has our steel series engine 3 software so you can have all of
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that fancy customization and noise rejection all those features that will
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help you be heard better in tournament settings that are noisy
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so in terms of comfort what have you guys done with this because i mean
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siberia is all about comfort but the reality of it is if you build a headset
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that's not comfortable then you might as well just fold up and close just close
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your shop now i think you're right about that so
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just like our siberia elite these ear cups are over padded with memory foam so
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they conform to the shape of your ears and the way that you your head wants
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them to fit we also have memory foam in the headband this is a new headband
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designed for us very flexible um
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this is not the final look but it's going to be a very attractive headband
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we wanted to show this to the gamers at pax because we thought it was important
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for everybody to see where we're going that despite the fact that we've
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introduced some mobile headsets in the last few years we've done some different
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things in different areas we still want everyone to know that we're focused on
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the tournament gamer because that's where we come from
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speaking of that one of the other features that tournament gamers i think
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will appreciate is a detachable cable
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the other end of the detachable cable which by the way is double fabric
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braided is a volume mute control
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and that same steel series micro connector which is our custom eight pin
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connector that we use on the usb sound card as well as on connectors for
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mobile exactly the flux in ear pro as well yeah
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and then we and then we allow you to connect either to your pc with the dual
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connectors or mobile with the single connector or mac so that gives us a nice
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robust rugged connection physically and
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also allows us to send a lot of data between the headset and the computer
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awesome thank you very much it's been a total pleasure having you walk us
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through these guys remember our trip to pax prime 2013 is powered by western
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digital Intel and steel series so big thanks to you guys
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for making it even possible for us to be here thanks a lot thanks for having us