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Purveyor of well-regarded gaming headsets, SteelSeries puts another Arctis Nova in the middle of the product line, which currently brings you the numbers 1,3,4 and 7 and the word Pro. This model, the $130 Nova 5, covers similar territory to higher-end models: It’s a premium wireless headset designed for use with PCs, consoles, and most others with a USB-C port, plus limited Bluetooth.

The Nova 5 comes in three versions: 5X for Xbox and PC, 5P for PlayStation and PC, and 5 for PC only. However, the specificity of “for” is a bit loose. The Xbox model works on all platforms; Microsoft requires a license (and therefore extra silicon in the dongle for the Xbox to accept it) and some love, so X is the all-in-one version I’ve tested. This also means there’s also a chat/mix disc on the headset, which the PlayStation doesn’t support and the 5P lacks. On the other hand, it still has a USB-C dongle that requires an adapter to work with the Xbox. Tempest 3D audio on PS5 is compatible with any headset. The dongle also works on other platforms with USB-C connections, such as Nintendo Switchon Meta quests, phones, etc. And you can always use Bluetooth.

At its price, you might want to consider picking up the Arctis Nova 7 instead if you find it on sale—I’ve seen it for $150, $30 less than the usual $180, which isn’t much for what you get 5. The Nova 7 line adds simultaneous Bluetooth — that’s a big deal for me, since I want to hear notifications over Bluetooth, and the Nova 5 lets you hear just the ring and switch to your phone to take incoming calls.

The Nova 7 also has an analog cable connection so you can connect to a controller, a metal rather than ABS plastic headband, and interchangeable earcup and headband plates. (You can swap out the foam and fabric ear cushions.) The Nova 5 has the same Clearcast Gen 2 mic, but with a setting to increase the bandwidth between the mic and the receiver so the signal theoretically doesn’t need as much compression.

Among the Nova 5’s competitors in the same price bracket, it stands out. The HyperX Cloud 3 Wireless, an excellent headset that lacks much of what you’d expect for the money – it makes up for it with phenomenal battery life – and the Razer BlackShark V2, a nice headset without Bluetooth or console compatibility. Corsair’s HS80 models are slightly cheaper, but they lack Bluetooth and the microphones seem particularly flimsy; many have broken upon me.

Design and features

As you’d expect from a mid-line addition, for the most part there’s no new tech here, just a mix of current models. If you’re unfamiliar with SteelSeries headsets, the 5 and newer include wireless support, a fully retractable microphone, the updated high-quality drivers from the previous line, and Sonar software support (for spatial audio, parametric EQ, mic noise cancellation, and More▼). It has swivel earcups with memory foam and cloth cushions, comfortable but a little loose for me — they stayed on my head well, but when I bent over they slid around. You can adjust the length in two ways, but there is no way to tighten it.

SteelSeries not included Steam Deck in its list of supported devices, but the dongle works as well as the others. Which is good because I couldn’t get Bluetooth to work properly with the Decca. The wide dongle does block the power button if that matters to you, and a USB-C extension cable isn’t offered, just a USB-A to USB-C female.

They differ in the accent color of the suspension headband – green for Xbox, blue for PlayStation and gray for PC – for what that’s worth. The headphones are currently only available in black.

According to SteelSeries, the claimed 60-hour battery life is the highest ever offered. The fine print is for Bluetooth; over 2.4GHz wireless it’s closer to 50. Extrapolating from my 15 or so hours of mixed use, in practice it should be closer to about 35, though of course YMMV. You can get a 6-hour charge in 15 minutes via USB, and although you can’t use the headphones over the connection, you can charge while you play.

The best upgrade to the SteelSeries headset debuting with the Nova 5 is the Sonar mobile app. The company’s app provides (well over 100) and lets you use two parametric EQ user profiles created on the computer, both via 2.4GHz wireless and Bluetooth, meaning you’re not stuck with the few controls that can to have on these platforms. It also lets you control the side tone and volume for the mic, but unfortunately doesn’t have access to the mic EQ profiles. It can either sync profiles between connection types, or you can set them individually for each connection.

productivity

It’s great to have the app for what it does, but it could use some tweaking. On the one hand, microphone profiles are important because people use the microphone differently over Bluetooth and 2.4 GHz, such as phone calls over Bluetooth and 2.4 GHz for pretty much everything else, depending on the device you’re connected to . The profiles are also in one big list, such as the four music profiles buried between Movie: Immersion and Naraka: Bladepoint.

The desktop app clutters your system as much as any of them, and that’s mostly Microsoft’s fault—it has to create a virtual drive for every use case in it, like a game or media, which means four virtual devices appear in my already long in my already long list of audio devices. This makes figuring out which “device” I need to hear from the too-long list of outputs an instant game.

SteelSeries now enables its excellent ClearCast noise cancellation in software by default. The mic has built-in noise cancellation, but in brief testing I didn’t hear much of a difference with it on versus off. The mic picks up excellent sound through the boom without picking up ambient sounds (except for my really clicking keyboard), but the secondary mic for use when the boom is retracted is extremely compressed and low sounding.

More annoyingly, though, there’s no foam cover for the microphone, and you’d just lose one the first time you put the boom back into the ear cup. But the mic’s excellent pickup picks up breath explosions (the sounds made by pushing them out of your mouth, like “p”s and “ts”) that require a lot of physical and software tweaking to minimize.

Given that the speakers are the same as the others in the Nova line of headphones, I’m not surprised that they sound quite similar: Really good. They don’t have a lot of bass, but they have a fairly wide soundstage and didn’t detect any distortion when blowing sound at volumes far beyond what the limiter would allow.

Other than a small glitch about 60 feet from the receiver through a few walls and a huge amount of potential conflict (I live in an apartment building), the signal seems pretty stable.

While I still like the Arctis Nova 7 series better, the SteelSeries Arctis Nova 5, 5X, and 5P give you all the audio quality of the 7, some of the Bluetooth, and a useful app at a lower price. And for the money, it’s remarkable value compared to many similarly priced competitors.