In many ways, I am to wireless gaming headsets what Captain Ahab was to Moby Dick. The holy trifecta of performance, comfort, and price has been my white whale through my adventures on the Pequod of audiophilia, and this is all getting a bit pretentious so I’ll stop there. For the ninety-eight percent of you that haven’t read the book, I’m saying I’ve never found a wireless gaming headset I’ve entirely liked. But Turtle Beach’s Stealth 600 series of console-targeted wireless gaming headsets actually surprised me quite a bit!
Make no mistake, they are very gamer-y, I mean just look at them. They look like Doritos tastes, and their earcups are shaped similarly. But by god was I surprised at how decently they held up.
Let’s first set the scene. The Turtle Beach Stealth 600 comes in two variants – a blue PS version and a green Xbox version, naturally – and provides approximately ten metres of wireless connectivity via its USB dongle. It can also be used on PC if desired. The height-adjustable, square-shaped earcups feature a flip-down mic, dials for sound and mic output volume, a sound mode toggle button, power button, and a Type-C USB port for charging after fifteen or so hours of use.
It’s not the most glasses-friendly headset – I don’t care what it says on the box – owing in part to the rather tight clamping force, and the odd-shaped cups that definitely won’t work for every ear shape. Despite having rather small ears that I definitely wasn’t bullied about in school, I struggled to tuck my ears into the cups. It’s also, just, rather large and present on your head. The exact weight isn’t mentioned on the box, but it can certainly be felt when worn for long periods.
If you can get past all of that and finally turn on the headset, you are then presented with a few different sound modes via the sound mode toggle button on the cups. These are communicated to you with beeps, so keep the manual handy, or don’t because one of them is objectively better than the others, and you’ll immediately know which one when you hear it. While the other modes are horrendous, this particular one elevates the headset exponentially towards what I would describe as inoffensively decent. I’ll explain.
With a gaming headset, you typically want the mids to be emphasised over the highs and lows – this is sometimes called soundstage or imaging, and is essentially what lets you visualise a scene using only sounds. In multiplayer this is straight hax, amplifying footsteps, gunshots, and dialog, without needing to visually place the sources. Bizarrely, the Stealth 600 opts instead to favour the highs and lows, and slightly underrepresents mids. The result is a confusingly-tuned headset that is passable at best for gaming but comes alive when listening to music.
For me, this seems like a… head-scratching… situation for Turtle Beach because the audience for this headset would likely be console gamers, so I’m willing to bet they’d be looking for a wireless headset for gaming only, or gaming and music, but certainly not music only, right?!
Elsewhere, the flip-down mic felt interesting to use, and was far enough away from the mouth to avoid the dreaded overemphasis of P and S sounds. Unfortunately, and perhaps due to the wireless connectivity, they also felt flat and over-compressed, and I had to resort to some PC tricks to get them decently amped enough to be sufficiently audible over Discord chat.
In terms of price, it’s bang-on where you would expect it, because it doesn’t sound as good as the more expensive HyperX Cloud Flight, but it sounds about as good as the similarly priced Corsair HS70. If you don’t mind a tight clamp, don’t wear glasses, and the aesthetic of this headset screams out to you, then this could be your white whale. But my white whale is still out there, somewhere, and so my search must continue.