Honestly I wanted to like this headset, after having the arctis Pro Wireless for 4 years and having the band cut out, I said why not I'll buy the newer version.
Was a mistake, first off, the spare battery layout for the headset which is the primary reason I went with this one over the countless other wireless headsets out there, is so annoying to take the cover off of, the arctis Pro Wireless I could while it's still on my head take the battery panel off pop the new battery in put the panel back on, this new one basically requires you to take the headset off find where the hole is with your finger and take the cover off which makes it more annoying to change the battery on
and then my biggest complaint, the Nova Pro Wireless requires you to use sonar for Channel control, meaning that instead of it having two built in different channels that you can choose which application goes to which channel and then use the balancer built in on the headset to balance between channels; you now have to install steelseries GG enable sonar which adds a middleware in between your programs instead if actually having it go through your headset, all of your sound now has to go through sonar then the headset. this would be perfectly fine if sonar worked, but it's supposed to be able to detect when your headset is on versus off(to change to your speaker), it does not work well, it believes that your headset is on at computer power on, meaning all audio goes through a powered off device instead of your speaker which is annoying. Then in the week that I've had this headset so far I've had to hard reset both the base and my headset three times because the mixer wheel button has stopped responding to the program meaning I can't move move the channel mixer back and forth, the old system didn't require this you only had to have the headset set up on the computer and then you could jump back and forth between your chat and your game channel.
then there's the feel of the headset, now this could just be me not used to the headset yet much like how the buttons are however I don't like the overall feel of how it is on my head, and the active noise cancellation that it has works somewhat, but considering that it's an over ear headset, I expected far more than what it provides I can still very clearly hear anyone around me or my equipment around me.
TLDR;
- bad layout(both battery and buttons)
- unreliable software/driver set
- bad ANC
- same audio quality as the old model
- expensive
better range
longer battery life
has the ability to swap between 3 devices concurrently (line 1, 2 and a Bluetooth device)
All In all, while I'm not going to be returning this headset because it does work for what I want it for, and it is nice. if the arctis Pro Wireless is still on the market when you read this review, save yourself the $70 to $100 and just buy the old model, given my experience with both of them, I feel the old model was vastly superior.