SteelSeries Siberia In-Ear Headset Review

The headphones reduce noise passively, meaning that there are no fancy electronics to “cancel out” noise as active sets do.  The silicone ear grips do help reduce noise almost as well as a passive “around the ear” headset does, as it forms a complete seal between your ear canal and the outside world.  With no music playing, outside sound was reduced and muffled, but still noticable.  Once music is playing, however, the outside world is barely noticable (assuming your music has relatively consistent volume).

To test the sound quality of the headphones, we sampled several different music types and played several PC games.  When testing music reproduction, we tried selections from The Canadian Brass’ “High, Bright, Light, and Clear”, which is one of the best digital classical recordings, in my opinion.  We also tested some techno ambient music to test the bass reproduction of these earbuds, and of course we couldn’t resist throwing in “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns n Roses to test the entire fidelity spectrum.

We tried EQ settings on several of these tracks to hear how much the audio signals can be pushed through these little earbuds.  They sound great even without any equalization, but some rock and dance music seemed a little flat.  The headphones responded favorably to maximum treble, which made the track much brighter, and the earphones sounded fine without any distortion.

Things were a little different when we played with bass settings.  Headphones with drivers this tiny weren’t expected to produce much bass at all, and the Siberia does produce much better bass than OEM earbuds, but lack the “umph” that a professional set can deliver.  A little bass enhancement improves the sound for dance and rock tracks, but you have to watch the threshold, as it was very easy to create distortion.  We could push the bass to “9” on most players without much distortion, but at 10 the bass of most tracks started to crumble.

We also played this set with BioShock, Call of Duty 4, Quake Wars, and other games that have loud gunfire.  The sound was very good, but explosions and gunfire lacked the extra push that lets you “feel” them.  Overall the sound produced by this headset is very crisp, but bass is only slightly better than average.

The microphone’s audio quality is pretty good, and is more than suitable for PC gaming or IP telephony.  One could even record a decent-sounding podcast with this mic.  How well others can hear you is dependant on how well you position the microphone, and most people should clip it to their t-shirt pointing up towards their mouths.  Because the mic isn’t directly in the path of your outgoing airway, you’ll reduce audio blowouts when making “puh” or “buh” sounds