Landing squarely in the middle between Turtle Beach’s lower end value based offerings and its ultra-performant, higher end headsets, the Turtle Beach Stealth 500 headset manages to hit that perfect sweet spot of providing players with a deftly pitched balance of value and performance. Intriguingly, the Turtle Beach Stealth 500 headset also brings a quality of form factor and comfort not seen anywhere else but in the highest echelons of the Turtle Beach headset line-up, resulting in a streamlined and yet feature packed mid-range headset that proves a roundly compelling proposition to anyone looking to dramatically up their headset game on a relatively modest budget.
Turtle Beach Stealth 500 Headset Review
In this Turtle Beach Stealth 500 headset review
- Wireless Performance
- Battery Life
- Sound Quality
- Final Words
Wireless Performance
The Turtle Beach Stealth 500 headset opens up with a versatile gambit in terms of its wireless performance, allowing users to easily toggle between low-latency 2.4GHz wireless and Bluetooth 5.2 connectivity with just the touch of a button. Additionally, the Turtle Beach Stealth 500 headset also boasts seamless cross-compatibility between PC, PlayStation and Nintendo Switch platforms too and while such a thing is a nicety (especially considering the PlayStation focus of this review), it’s still good to know that the headset can be easily brought to other folks houses and used on their non-PlayStation gaming devices with little friction.
Being able to switch between wireless and Bluetooth is super handy, not least because the Stealth 500 headset’s single switch allows you to seamlessly switch between audio sources pretty much instantaneously (and really should be an industry standard feature for *all* headsets in this day and age – but I digress). Initial setup is also reassuringly easy on both PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, too. Simply plug in the USB dongle into the USB port on your console, pair up to the headset for the first time and that’s it – away you go. Happy days.
Battery Life
Easily one of the most formidable aspects of the Turtle Beach Stealth 500 headset is the battery life that it ably provides. Clocking in at an impressive 40 hours of battery life, the Turtle Beach Stealth 500 headset is right up there with the much more expensive and higher end Stealth 700 Gen 2 MAX headset, resulting in a gaming headset that is more than capable of going for long stretches.
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Brilliantly, the leveraging of Quick Charge functionality together with the supplied USB-C charging cable, also means that the Turtle Beach Stealth 500 headset can be juiced all the way back up to a full battery in a matter of minutes, rather than hours. This is just another example of how Turtle Beach’s punchy mid-range headset feels a lot higher end than its roundly reasonable price suggests.
Sound Quality
Perhaps the most important thing to get out of the way before I delve into the strengths and weaknesses of the Turtle Beach Stealth 500 headset, is that AI noise cancelling is not included in Turtle Beach’s latest chunk of audio hardware. Naturally, this will prove to be a disappointment to some looking to embrace the feature but also some pragmatism is called for here, since Turtle Beach is offering up a £80/$80 mid-range headset that other than the lack of noise cancelling, is extremely competitive on every other front. Certainly from the perspective of this author, I would not want to give up other aspects of the Stealth 500’s design just to have noise cancelling included here (and of course, paying more for noise cancelling on top of everything else would essentially mean that you would be in the market for a higher end headset anyway, such as the Turtle Beach Stealth Pro, for example).
Speaking of features, Turtle Beach’s Superhuman technology is also very much part of the the Stealth 500’s technical offering and much akin to its implementation in the 600, 700 Gen 2 MAX and Stealth Pro headsets is used to accentuate a broad spectrum of subtle sounds that would otherwise be missed. In practice, the technology is really put through its paces in more tense, atmospheric fare such as Alan Wake 2, where everything from relatively distant footsteps to creeping, unearthly sound effects pop through more than they otherwise would do. Of course, this feature will run into the law of diminishing returns with titles that are less concerned with engineering such nuanced sound work, though thankfully like the other recent headsets in the Turtle Beach range, the feature can be turned off with the touch of a button.
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Elsewhere, the Stealth 500 simply just performs well as a headset. The 40mm speaker drivers provide punchy enough audio, which though it struggles a little with fashioning appropriately weighty acoustics (this isn’t marketed as a high-end headset, in case we forget), nonetheless scores points on account of its welcome support for decently proportioned spatial sound and Turtle Beach’s Swarm II app which allows a much more precise calibration of the Stealth 500’s sound output capabilities.
In addition to enabling such customisation on the part of the user, the Swarm II software also allows users to keep their Stealth 500 headset up to date with the latest firmware too, making it an effective and comprehensive one-stop shop of sorts for all manner of functionality relating to your shiny new Stealth 500 headset.
Form Factor, Comfort & Overall Design
For me, one of the most attractive aspects of the Turtle Beach Stealth 500 headset is just how slight it feels. Easily the lightest headset that Turtle Beach has come out with in years, wearing the Stealth 500 is an utterly comfortable experience to the point that you can sometimes forget you’re even wearing a headset at all. At the heart of this comfort is the one-two punch of the floating headband and memory foam cushions, both of which effectively conspire to make the Turtle Beach Stealth 500 headset earn its lofty status as one of the most comfortable and right up there with the much more costly Stealth Pro headset as one of the most user friendly headsets ever made.
Beyond the comfort of the Stealth 500, other Turtle Beach design mainstays also make their appearance on the device. The omni-directional microphone is here and proves useful for muting audio chat streams without having to go into a litany of menus and disabling it yourself, while the variable mic monitoring function allows you to properly parse your own audio output so that you can hear how you come across to other players. Again, there’s nothing new here, but it’s still worth mentioning how impressive it is that the Stealth 500 incorporates so many features that would be considered cutting edge or high-end in the headsets made by other manufacturers.
Final Words
At once feeling ultra-light whilst also coming across as an appreciably handsomely made piece of kit, the Turtle Beach Stealth 500 generously stuffs impressive performance, high-end features and industry best comfort into a headset at a mid-range price. Quite simply, paying £80/$80 gets you a whole lot of headset that punches a good chunk higher than its relatively lower end price point might initially suggest, making the Turtle Beach Stealth 500 headset easily the best mid-range headset you can buy right now that gives a pleasingly outsized amount of bang for your buck.
The Turtle Beach Stealth 500 headset releases on May 31, 2024.
Review unit kindly provided by Turtle Beach PR.
