Gadgetory

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