Audio Quality and Comfort

The Siberia Elites came into this with very large shoes to fill. The Siberia v2’s have been extremely popular because they sound good and are extremely comfortable. So when into testing of the Elites I have very high expectations. When it came to comfort I could see how thick the padding was on the earcups, so I wasn’t to worried that they would be uncomfortable. My initial reaction was a little disappointing because unlike previous models the earcups don’t go around your ears, they are so thick that they push on your ears some. With so much padding this isn’t to big of a deal for most people, but I did have an issue. The Siberia Elites fit my wife perfectly, and even most other people. But I have a slightly larger head than most. When on my head the stainless steel frame pushed back on me a little more. This caused the extremely soft padding in the earcups to compress more than normal and in the end it made them a little less comfortable than I had hoped. That’s not to say that they weren’t comfortable, but I did have very high expectations going in and I was disappointed to find out that they didn’t support my head size as well as the Sibeira V2’s. That didn’t stop us from testing though. I had my wife run them for a while to see how the long term comfort was compared to the long term comfort when on a larger head (me). She was very happy with them where I wasn’t. So in the end, I think your experience is going to depend on how large your head is. Big guys need not bother but everyone else will like them.

Moving on to the Siberia Elites audio performance, I spent a lot of time using the Siberia Elite in game, watching movies, and listening to music while working. With the Siberia Elite using the same driver as the 9H that I also recently tested, I had a good idea of what to expect from the Elite. That means the Elite performed well in most cases like the 9H but I did run into the same distortion when listening loudly to songs with a lot of bass when using the USB sound card. SteelSeries released an update for the soundcards firmware to address this just a few days ago and I did have a chance to test it out as well. I can confirm that they fixed the issue, but they were able to fix it by lowering the max volume output of the USB soundcard. This was a little disappointing, because the volume difference makes a big difference. I would recommend just avoiding using the sound card when you need more volume. Hopefully they will continue to work on tuning the sound card.