Turtle Beach has long been one of the go-to names for video game headsets, and has been associated with online console gaming since the days of Call of Duty 2 and Halo.
While it's continued to dominate a slice of the mid-range market ever since, the Stealth Pro marks the brand's return to the top-end, with a premium and solidly built headset that brings a lot to the table. We've used it for our regular gaming sessions to bring you our verdict.
Turtle Beach Stealth Pro
This is a stellar headset that sits with the best we've tried, only falling short of our very favourites on small details of comfort. Its sound is excellent, the battery-swapping is welcome and the microphone excels, which adds up to a seriously compelling option at an undeniably premium price.
- Great sound
- Very solid microphone
- Swappable battery system
- Expensive
- A little heavy and tight at first
Design
- Weighs 422g
- Available in black only
Turtle Beach's headset designs, whether you've been going in for its most budget options or heading for the higher end of its offering, have had one material in common over recent years - plastic.
That is to say, they've almost all been constructed entirely out of plastic, to differing levels of durability and weight - so the Stealth Pro is an immediate and telling premium outlier in the hand.
There's plenty of metal here, making for a much more robust-feeling headset, that's a good chunk heavier for it, too. A hint of braided cable adds to that hardy impression, while the earcups and cushioning in use are as plump and sizeable as any Turtle Beach has ever made.
Plastic isn't completely absent, of course - otherwise, this would be a half-ton headset. But where it's used the finish is nice and smooth for a convincingly premium feel overall.
Slip the headset on, and the Stealth Pro is pretty comfortable (and that's about as harsh a criticism as we have for this impressive bit of kit). The weightiness of the build and the design of the earcups does mean that the headset sits a little tight compared to the cloud-like lightness of the SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro Wireless that we've loved using, though.
However, it's still very comfortable - just arguably not quite as impressive as the competition at its price point. With no other colour options right now, it's black and silver all the way, too.
There is a slight design difference for the Xbox-branded version over the standard Stealth Pro, though, with a green light ring on the headset's charging base and transmitter, instead of a blue one. We'll touch on that model in more detail shortly, though.
Sound quality and microphone
- 50mm Nanoclear drivers
- 10Hz - 22kHz frequency response
While build quality can be a good bonus and a welcome touch when you're spending over $300 on a headset, the thing that actually matters most for many players is the sound that it can offer.
Turtle Beach might well have its origins in headsets aimed squarely at online play in chaotic shooters, but the Stealth Pro has been an able companion in a range of other genres for us.
Playing an action game like Dead Island 2 had us hearing zombies round corners and recoiling from the goriness of our weapon's impacts on the undead, while using it with Persona 5 Royal's sparkling jazz-infused soundtrack made for a lighter but equally detailed response.
Still, it's online that a headset's capabilities can actually offer something approaching an advantage, and unsurprisingly the Stealth Pro has proved a superb pair with Warzone 2.0.
The Call of Duty battle royale's full-scale solo mode is a brutal test of reaction times and careful movement, and we had superb results turning on the Stealth Pro's Advance Superhuman Hearing mode, a long name for a custom EQ that flattens out sound and highlights distant gunfire and quiet footsteps to ensure you hear what you need to.
It works really impressively and being able to toggle it on and off with a button press on the right earcup is smart. Even better, the button in question is textured so that you can tell it apart from the adjacent power button, another very clever design decision.
With full EQ support to let you tweak your settings as you like, there's plenty of scope to set the headset up as you prefer, which is always welcome, but right out of the box (as most people will use it) the Stealth Pro is very impressive.
Microphone response, meanwhile, is also vital in online worlds, and the Stealth Pro's mic is a really great one, coming across clearer on PlayStation party chats than anything we've tested recently.
You can swing it up and away when not in use, and it's very flexible to let you get it positioned right for the best voice capture, making it a versatile part of the headset's offering.
Battery life and features
- 12-hour battery, spare pack included for swapping
- Xbox version compatible with all consoles
- EQ and earcup control customisable
The arms race in the world of headsets means that a solid design and great sound is no longer enough to make a headset compete - you need some extra little tidbits.
Foremost among these is great battery life, something that has been coming on leaps and strides in recent years. Turtle Beach has cadged a great trick by copying SteelSeries' homework here.
Like the Arctis Nova Pro Wireless, the Stealth Pro has batteries that you can easily remove and swap out - with one housed charging in its base station at all times.
This means you can simply swap them when you're running low (they last over 12 hours each) to have nearly unlimited battery life when managed as such. It's a tiny bit fiddly to do this swap, requiring the microphone to be removed so that a magnetised cover can be pried off, but can still easily be done in a matter of 20 seconds or so.
It might not be original, but we still love this feature and it means that charging cables and low-battery crises are a thing of the past.
Active noise-cancelling also ensures that you're more cocooned than ever in your headset while gaming, and while it won't rival the mainstream likes of Sony's WH-1000XM5, it's still a hugely welcome presence. That impressive microphone will also cancel out background noise as a bonus.
A final, but pretty important note comes where compatibility is concerned - not for the first time, it's worth mentioning that the Xbox-branded version of the Stealth Pro is by far the version to pick up, for one simple reason.
It works with Xbox consoles, but also with every other type including PlayStation and Switch as well as PC, whereas the standard version of the headset is excluded from Microsoft's consoles despite having an identical price tag.
This presumably comes down to how Microsoft handles its licensing or branding but is fundamentally a bit loopy. Still, if you want a headset that works with everything, bear it in mind.
Verdict
Turtle Beach has arrived back in the high-end market with a splash - the Stealth Pro is an immediate contender for anyone looking to pick up a new premium gaming headset.
With high-quality materials and game-winning sound, the only thing we'd tweak would be to make it slightly lighter if possible, which is far from a huge deal.
Of course, it comes with a fairly frightful price tag that could well scare people back into the mid-range, but for those who want top quality, this is certainly a compelling option.