SteelSeries has been on something of a roll recently, with their redesigned Arctis Nova Pro headsets and new Arena speakers both attracting plaudits from press - including Eurogamer - and users alike for their design, audio quality and software. Now the Danish firm has turned its attention to the other side of audio: microphones. We've seen even great audio brands like Epos fail to deliver a convincing microphone for the gaming and streaming market, so how does SteelSeries fare with its Alias and Alias Pro microphones? In a word: superbly.
Let's start at the beginning. The Alias microphones are both built around a one-inch condenser capsule in a cardioid pattern, designed to capture your voice while sitting at a PC - rather than the Blue Yeti approach of offering four different pickup patterns for different recording scenarios that use up to four smaller capsules in combination. This focus allows for a noticeably slimmer microphone without sacrificing on sound quality. (The Alias's main body is around 190x55x45mm or 470cm³, compared to the 702cm³ Blue Yeti X and 590cm³ Shure SM7B.)
The difference between the Alias and Alias Pro is how they connect to your PC - both ultimately attach via USB, but the Alias connects directly with controls built into the body of the microphone, while the Alias Pro comes with a small audio interface that it connects to via an XLR cable. Despite this, both models can be controlled via SteelSeries' Sonar software and both are designed to be plug-and-play options that don't require other hardware to sound great. The Alias Pro mic works with another XLR interfaces - and the interface works with other XLR mics - but the focus here is on maximising usability and sound quality with these two components working in tandem; later upgradeability is more of a bonus than a core feature.