The best gaming headsets for 2024 Buying Guide

Most of the time, the best gaming headset isn’t a “gaming headset” at all. Although these devices are often thought of as a distinct niche within the wider headphone market, they’re ultimately still headphones. And while it’s certainly not impossible to find gaming headsets that sound nice, those tend to cost much more than a comparable pair of wired headphones (yes, those still exist).

A good wired headphone remains your best bet if you want the most detailed sound possible at any given price point and don’t need something especially portable, which is usually the case while gaming. If you need to chat with friends, you can always buy an external microphone, whether it’s a USB mic, a cheaper clip-on model or a standalone option like the Antlion ModMic or V-Moda BoomPro. Oftentimes, those’ll make your voice sound clearer and fuller than a gaming headset’s built-in mic.

But we recognize that many people just want the convenience of an all-in-one combo. So after testing out a few dozen pairs over the past several months, we’ve put together a list of good headphones for gaming and full-on gaming headsets. We recommend you consider the former first, but all of them will make your play time more enjoyable.

What to look for in good gaming headphones

Evaluating headphones is a particularly subjective exercise, so calling one pair the absolute “best” is something of a fool’s errand. At a certain point, whether you’re an audiophile or not, everything becomes a matter of taste. For most, a headphone with a wide soundscape and strong imaging performance — i.e., the ability to position sounds correctly, so you can more precisely tell where footsteps and other game effects are coming from — will provide the most immersive gaming experience, the kind that makes you feel like your head is within a given scene.

For that, you want a high-quality pair of open-back headphones. That is to say, an over-ear pair whose ear cups do not completely seal off the ear from air and outside noise. These are inherently terrible at isolating you from external sound and preventing others from hearing what you’re playing, so if you often play games in a noisy environment, their benefits will be blunted. But in a quiet room, the best open-back pairs sound significantly wider and more precise than more common closed-back models.

More up for debate is how a good gaming headphone should sound. If you want something that’ll help you in competitive multiplayer games, you may prefer a headphone with a flatter sound signature, which’ll keep a game’s mix from being overly boosted in one direction and is less likely to mask the smaller details of what’s happening around you. A slightly brighter sound, one that pushes the upper frequencies a tad, may also work. Open-back headphones almost never have huge sub-bass, so you rarely have to worry about low-end sounds muddying up the rest of the signature. In this light, the fact that an overwhelming amount of gaming headsets are closed-back and bass-heavy seems counterintuitive.

Lots of people love bass, though. And if you don’t really care about competitive play, some extra low-end can add a touch of excitement to action scenes or rousing soundtracks. You still don’t want a pair that boosts the low-end too hard — as many gaming headsets do — but the point is that what makes a pair “immersive” to one person may sound dull to another.