Making a truly great gaming headset isn’t as easy as it looks – you have to carefully thread the needle on cost, sound quality, comfort and connectivity if you want to build something that people will love using as they game day in, day out.
Turtle Beach has been in the game for longer than most, and its latest flagship headset is the Stealth 700 Gen 2 Max, which boasts some really great specs – we’ve been using it to see how it holds up to the stiff competition.
Design
- Plastic build
- Flip-to-mute microphone
- Volume and sidetone controls on earcup
Turtle Beach’s headsets don’t tend to change a huge amount down the years in terms of looks – when it sets a design, it sticks with it. This means the Stealth 700 Gen 2 Max looks a lot like the rest of its headsets – whether that’s the older Stealth 700 models or the slightly less fancy ones without “Max” on the end.
Still, this is no bad thing – the headsets have a reliable build and this means if one fits you comfortably you can be confident that they all will.
Things are again largely plastic, with some metal reinforcement in the band, but the build quality is nice and sturdy so there isn’t a durability concern here. Cushioning on the earcups is suitably soft, but we found the Stealth 700 Gen 2 Max a little tight while wearing it, especially compared to greats like the SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless.
The headset’s microphone flips down from one of the earcups when you want it, and while it doesn’t extend that close to your mouth, it gives really impressive voice pick-up that beats some more expensive competitors handily.
One earcup holds the power button, a Bluetooth switch for alternative connections, and two dials – one to adjust your sidetone levels, and another to control the master volume. This all works nicely, and it’s useful to have them at your fingertips.
Rounding things off, the dongle for console connectivity is pretty unobtrusive and has an LED to give you an indication of its connection status – more on that later.
Sound quality
- 50mm neodymium drivers
- 20Hz – 22kHz frequency response
Slipping the headset on for some actual gaming, the readout is pretty good for Turtle Beach.
This might be its top-line headset but it’s not priced too aggressively compared to some truly premium options out there, and in the bracket it falls into, it’s got pretty good sound quality.
It packs in plenty of oomph with punchy bass, but preserves the detail in the mid and upper ranges, too. That’s been a perfect pairing with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which has explosions and gunfire to spare.
Things are similarly solid in singleplayer games that have a bit more range (and quieter moments), so we’re confident that this would make a great choice for someone who enjoys genre-hopping in the same way that we do.
As mentioned above, the microphone is also a bit of a wonder – it punches well above its weight and is up there with the clearest we’ve tested. Getting good microphone quality even on a console is something of a rarity, so your friends will thank you if you make this your choice of headset moving forward.
Features
- 48-hour battery life
- Compatible with all consoles via dongle switch
- USB-C charging
Turtle Beach discovered (or implemented, at least) cross-console compatibility in many of its most recent wave of headsets, something that has long been missing from too many headsets on the market.
This means that you can use the Stealth 700 Gen 2 Max across Xbox and PlayStation consoles, as well as on Switch and PC, all by flipping between two settings on the wireless dongle it uses. However, bafflingly (and likely due to Sony’s approach), this is only true of the Xbox “version” of the headset, which will work with everything.
The PlayStation-branded equivalent won’t work on Xbox, and is identical in every other way including price. So, you should absolutely buy the Xbox version if you have the option, since it’ll cover your bases without costing any extra.
While it might be something that we start to demand from every headset, this is still relatively rare and therefore completely laudable, and could save you the cost of a second headset if you have more than one console in use.
Sadly, using the headset primarily on PS5 we did have some fun-dampening connectivity issues – in particular, waking the console or turning it on with the dongle still plugged in from a previous session would more often than not result in it flashing a red light at us and only half connecting.
This would get us our in-game sound but fail to connect the microphone, leaving our party members baffled by our silence as we repeatedly enquired whether they could hear us. Having to unplug the dongle each time we use it, to plug it back in again fresh, is a bit of a bummer.
Elsewhere, 48 hours of battery life and pretty quick charging via USB-C means you won’t have to feel tethered to a nightly recharge ritual, something we always appreciate.