Software

With their new headsets, SteelSeries has also started moving their products over to their latest SteelSeries Engine (3). Having used the second version for the past few years, 3 feels a little less cluttered, almost to a fault. When you first open it up it will ask you to select the product that you are using from a list of all supported SteelSeries products plugged in. When you select the 9H it will open up a second window with all of your configuration options in it. I would personally prefer if this all stayed in one window rather than opening up multiple windows on my desktop.

Being a headset the settings that you can change are fairly limited but still more than I would have expected. You have a full equalizer as well as presets available for you to pick from. There are a couple on/off switches for features built into the USB soundcard like the Dolby setting, mic noise reduction, and mic compression. I love how the mic volume knob and mic sidetone knobs look but I did find them a little harder to use than a side slider. Beyond all of that you also have a nice photo of the headset itself right there as well. If you are happy with your settings you can actually save them on the configs tab down at the bottom giving you a chance to save more than one configuration if needed. I suspect this part of the software will become more useful when they start moving their mice over, but it’s still nice to have.

The one part of the software that had me a little confused at the time was the Auto Mic Compression. SteelSeries placed small question marks on each option, clicking on them tells you more about the setting to help get you all setup. In the case of this option, it helps keep your mic volume at a good level if you talk quiet or loudly.