SteelSeries Arctis GameBuds - Review
Over the years I have been slowly converted to the SteelSeries ranges of headsets, they are super comfy, deliver great sound and if wireless, have great battery life. So when it was announced that they were doing earbuds, I was eager to see if the trend would continue. So did it?
As with all headsets, form is more important than function, but while the traditional SteelSeries offerings have wrapped around my ears, earbuds go in them, so the form was always going to feel different. One thing that I am incredibly happy to report is that the moment I took them from their carrying case and put them in my ears, they fit perfectly, no jiggling required. Over the years I have tried a lot of earbuds, some wireless and some not and each time they never just fit, some of them did come with other rubber bits to swap out to try and make them fit, but they still were never perfect. These were just sublime and even now after weeks of wearing them, they still feel as snug as ever and I am very, very happy about that. Because there is no headband or cord to worry about, that is really all I have to say about the form, they sit in my ears beautifully and for that I am quite chuffed.
One the function side of things the earbuds support two connection methods, Bluetooth and 2.4Ghz via the included dongle. What is nice about the buds is that you can swap between the connection methods, just by tapping the buttons on the buds, so if you are in the middle of a game and someone calls, no need to take them out, just tap tap tap and you are good to go. Speaking of buttons, I feel that I need to address this, on each bud is a single button, it takes up the entire side of a bud and they feel good to push down. The problem with them is that they don’t tell you how you control music with them, but they do tell you the morse code inputs in order to use them for phone functions. Ok, so that last part as hyperbole, but there are combinations of tap and hold or just tap or just hold, that you need to learn in order to answer a call, hang up, mute and more.
Assuming you are not going to use them on phone calls, but rather gaming like intended, then you will be happy to know that they work great. No matter what connection method you use, you will get access to all the functions that they support and the app will help you there. Now it is crucial to understand that you don’t need the app in order to use them, but if you don’t you won’t have access to any of the functions like active noise cancellation and the equalizer settings. Without any features enabled though the sound quality is good, I was able to enjoy games on both my Switch and PlayStation 5 without any issues, but enabling a few features does make things better. A great example is the noise cancellation, I was recently in Tokyo and on the flight back, I used the buds as my headphones, I watched some movies via the planes entertainment system, using the amazing AirFly Pro and everything was great. Except after a few hours of sleep, I decided to put some music on and only then did I realise, I didn’t have the noise cancellation active, so a quick trip into the app to turn it on and almost all the plane noise vanished and that was before I hit play.
For context I was sitting near the engine as I had a window seat and turning on the ANC basically eliminated the noise, it was that good. It also removed the sounds of people coughing and a particularly loud crying baby and that made the last few hours of the flight fly by. When I used the noise cancellation in Tokyo, I was actually on a train heading out to a second hand game store and it cut the noise from the train tracks and the announcements out drastically, so it is good. Using ANC in games does seem a little pointless for me, as I don’t have a lot of noise around me, but again on both PlayStation 5 and Switch, the headphones cleaned up the outside noise and just focused on the game audio. Honestly, the active noise cancellation in the buds is perhaps one of the best I have encountered, but there is an issue I found with the buds.
I do a long daily walk and for the last few weeks, I have been using these buds to enjoy my music while I do, the problem I found was that if it was windy, the ANC couldn’t eliminate the wind noise. That would not be a problem, but instead it somehow amplified it, making it a little harder to enjoy what I was listening to, so much so that I had to turn it off. Sadly if that was the only issue, I would still love the buds, but I encountered two issues that were so annoying, they really make me hope I was just sent a dud pair. Randomly and I do mean randomly, I found that one bud would lose connection to my phone, only for a few seconds, then it would come back online and work as normal. This didn’t happen just once or twice, but more than a dozen times and while it was usually the left bud, sometimes it was the right. The other issue I had was in swapping between the two connection methods, sometimes I would press the buttons and it would say it was swapped, but not register correctly for a good 10 seconds. Now that is not an issue going from a call back to a game, but if you need to swap to answer a call, it would be quite the annoyance.
Those issues aside, the buds do work great, but as I mentioned before, the app is what makes them amazing. Once you load it up you will discover a plethora of settings you can tweak and the massive boost is the equalizer presets, which let you adjust the range of the buds for your game. You can create your own or use the ones that are preset within the app and there are a lot of them. The app has presets for Call of Duty, Fortnite, EA Sports FC 24, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and 100 more and while you can select any preset, putting one on for Overwatch 2 and then playing Roblox may not be ideal. There are also presets for music, so you can enjoy your tunes in the best way possible and perhaps the coolest part, you can set them for each connection method. That means if you play Call of Duty on your mobile, you can set the Bluetooth connection to that, but when you connect back to your PlayStation 5 via the dongle for some Rocket League, you won’t have to change anything in the app.
Overall, I really like the SteelSeries Arctis GameBuds, but they have a few issues. The most annoying issue is the drop out and while you could attribute that to a pair with an issue, due to the random nature of that, I don’t think it is, but I am happy to be proven wrong. Now when the buds worked, they worked incredibly well and delivered some great sound for both games and music. The active noise cancellation is amazing and it being able to cut out most of the noise on a busy plane trip was great, but it seems a strong breeze confuses it. If you plan to just use them at home for your gaming, then you won’t have any issues and will honestly find a pair of buds that offers a great battery life for their size. Are the buds perfect, no, but when they were working for me, I often forgot about those issues and just enjoyed what I was doing.
The Score
8.0
Review unit provided by SteelSeries
The Pros
The fit on these buds is flawless, from the moment you put them in
The app gives you control over a lot of the options and the eq settings make it so easy to enhance your game…
The Cons
… but not being able to turn ANC on without the app feels like a bit of a misstep
The random drop outs of buds and slow swap times is a mark against them
