How to Buy a Gaming Headset — Sound, Mic, and Where the Money Stops Helping
Headset marketing sells surround sound and RGB. What actually determines whether you hear footsteps is soundstage and driver quality, and both plateau surprisingly early.
The short answer
For competitive gaming, an open-back headset with a wide soundstage beats a closed-back one for positional accuracy, and wired beats wireless for latency and reliability. Sound quality improvements are substantial up to about £70 and modest above it, while microphone quality keeps improving with price much longer. A budget headset plus a separate USB microphone frequently outperforms an expensive all-in-one headset at the same total cost.
Verified and last updated August 12, 2026.
- Time needed
- 12 min
- Difficulty
- Beginner
- Read time
- 5 min
I ran a blind footstep-direction test across six headsets, from a £30 pair to a £250 flagship, in a CS2 custom map with a friend walking known routes. The results were not what the price tags suggested.
The £30 pair was clearly worse. The £70 pair was close to indistinguishable from the £250 one for the specific task of locating a sound. Where the expensive headset was obviously better was in music, in comfort over four hours, and in build quality.
That is the honest shape of this market.
What determines whether you hear the footstep
Not surround sound and not driver size. It is soundstage — the perceived space the sound exists in — and the clarity of the mid-to-high frequencies where footstep sounds actually sit. Open-back designs are better at both, and they cost less to build than the marketing implies.
Open-back versus closed-back
The most consequential decision, and one most buyers never make consciously because most gaming headsets are closed-back by default.
Open-back drivers have perforated outer housings. Air moves freely, so the driver is not fighting a sealed chamber, and the result is a wider and more natural soundstage. Directional cues are noticeably easier to place. The cost: sound leaks out and ambient noise comes in.
Closed-back seals the driver. You get isolation and stronger bass, at the cost of a more constricted presentation of space.
For competitive play in a room by yourself, open-back is the better tool. For a shared space, a noisy environment, or streaming with speakers nearby, closed-back is the practical choice.
Where the money stops helping
Sound quality improves steeply from £25 to about £70, then flattens hard for gaming purposes specifically.
The pattern holds because the difficult engineering in a headphone — driver quality, acoustic chamber design — got cheap. What stays expensive is materials, comfort over hours, and tuning refinement, and those matter for reasons other than hearing an enemy.
The microphone is the exception
Microphone quality keeps improving with price far longer than sound quality does, and even then a headset mic is limited by physics.
A boom microphone has a small capsule, sits close to your mouth in a position optimised for convenience rather than acoustics, and shares a budget with everything else in the product. A standalone USB microphone at £45 has a larger capsule, better isolation and a proper stand.
This produces a useful buying strategy: if people hear you regularly — streaming, recording, a lot of voice comms — buy a £60 headset and a £45 microphone rather than a £110 headset. The audio you produce will be dramatically better and the audio you hear will be essentially the same.
Settings that beat spending money
Four changes that improved footstep audibility more in testing than moving up two price bands:
Turn off every bass boost and EQ preset 2 min
Gaming EQ presets almost universally boost bass, and excess bass masks the frequencies footsteps occupy. Flat is better. If your headset software has a 'competitive' or 'FPS' preset, check what it actually does before trusting it — several are bass-boosted too.
Rebalance the in-game audio mix 2 min
Music to zero, effects volume down, dialogue down. You are trying to make quiet sounds audible, and the loudest thing in the mix determines how much room the quiet things have.
Use the game's own spatial audio, not the headset's 3 min
CS2, Apex and Valorant all include HRTF or spatial options built around their own level geometry. These consistently outperform generic headset-software surround, which is often just reverb.
Check Windows is not applying its own processing 2 min
Sound Control Panel → your device → Enhancements → disable all. Windows sometimes applies loudness equalisation that compresses dynamic range, which is precisely the opposite of what you want when trying to hear something quiet.
What works
What doesn't
Key takeaways
Frequently asked questions
Is virtual surround sound actually useful?
Sometimes, and it depends entirely on the implementation. Good spatial processing — Windows Sonic, Dolby Atmos for Headphones, or a game's native HRTF — genuinely improves vertical positioning, which stereo handles poorly. Cheap headset-bundled 'surround' software is usually a reverb effect that muddies everything and makes footsteps harder to place. Try the platform-level option before trusting the one bundled with your headset.
Open-back or closed-back for gaming?
Open-back for positional accuracy, closed-back for isolation. Open-back drivers let air move freely, producing a wider and more natural soundstage that makes directional cues considerably easier to place. The trade is that everyone near you hears your game and you hear the room. If you play in a quiet space alone, open-back is the better competitive choice by a clear margin.
Is wireless worth the compromise?
It has got much better and it still costs you something. A modern 2.4GHz dongle connection has latency low enough to be imperceptible in practice — Bluetooth does not, and should not be used for gaming. What you still pay is battery management, a slightly higher price for equivalent sound, and one more thing that can fail. Wired remains the value choice; wireless is a convenience purchase, which is a perfectly good reason to buy it.
Why do expensive headsets have bad microphones?
Because there is a hard physical limit to what fits on a boom arm, and headset makers spend their budget where reviews focus. Even a £250 headset has a microphone that a £45 standalone USB mic will comfortably beat, simply because the standalone has room for a larger capsule and better isolation. If people hear you often, a cheap headset plus a separate microphone is the better allocation of the same money.
How do I actually hear footsteps better?
Four things, in order of impact. Turn off any bass boost or 'gaming' EQ preset — excess bass masks the mid and high frequencies footsteps live in. Turn down music and effects volume in the game so the mix is not fighting itself. Use the game's own spatial audio option where one exists, since it is built for that game's geometry. And use an open-back headset if your environment allows it. Notably, none of these cost money.
About the author
Competitive & Settings Editor
Dan played CS:GO semi-professionally in a regional ESEA Main roster between 2017 and 2020, and has hit Radiant in VALORANT in three separate acts. He now spends most of his competitive energy on the unglamorous side of the game: input latency, sensitivity consistency and warm-up routines that actually transfer.
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