Performance
When the microphone is live, the indicator light on the front lights up white, it’s not too bright, but it’s a nice clear indication that the microphone is live, lest you tell your workmates what you really think of them on your next teams call.
When it’s muted, the light turns red, so now would be the perfect time to do all your coughing, eat your crisps, and listen to obnoxiously loud and distorted mumble rap. That may not apply to you, but surely the people I keep finding in my CoD lobbies will read this and may learn something.
One nice touch is that when you control the volume the indicator light becomes a little volume bar, which fills as you turn the dial.
Then obviously at maximum volume, the whole bar is purple. Actually, in this shot, you can see through the mesh filter of the microphone and see that lovely little circle inside; that’s the massive 25mm microphone sitting inside.
It’s a surprisingly big microphone head, and that’s a good thing, as it’s going to be able to pick up a lot more low and mid-range frequencies, giving you a (hopefully) bigger and more natural sound compared to, well, smaller microphones. So, let’s try recording my voice, if it sounds pretty terrible, you can rest assured, that that’s just what I sound like.
Remembering The Issues of the Past
The original model that came before this was brilliant, but it came with a fault. We caught it in our review, and NZXT had to issue a firmware update to all users. But in doing so, they turned a good microphone into a truly great one, one that we still use in the eTeknix HQ to this day. We covered this more in a video two years ago, which you can check out below.
Is It Working on The New One?
Yup, honestly it’s a non-issue now, it’s plug-and-play on Windows, it defaults to the good settings, and that means you can just get on and play, stream, chat, record and have fun. Windows defaults to the 2 channels, 24-bit, 48000 Hz (Studio Quality) mode. This is the Windows default quality mode and not an issue with NZXT. If you have a need for it, you can increase the quality to the maximum 129000 Hz mode, and while in the past, this resulted in a chipmunk-sounding playback, it works perfectly on the Capsule Elite in 2025; and on the old models with their fixed firmware.
Of course, for the purpose of my own testing, I will be using the top quality 24-bit 192000 Hz quality mode and recording using the same settings in Audacity, a free and open-source sound recording suite.
The software is really easy to use, offering three simple-to-understand tabs, the most important of which is the Voice Equalizer tab. Here, you can test your microphone, adjust the EQ, and interestingly, enable Advanced Voice EQ options. This unlocks a low pass and high pass filter, frequency and Q factor adjustment, so you can really fine-tune your experience. Play around with it, hit the test button, see if you like it or not, tweak it again, and so on. If it sounds garbage, just reset the profile, and try again.
Advanced Settings is amusing, as there’s an advanced settings button the advanced settings tabs, so they’re like, super advanced. They actually are, and likely not needed by most typical users, but there’s some really neat stuff in here. There’s a full noise suppression system and noise gate, with dDe-esser, and de-popper.
There’s a highly customisable noise gate and compressor, with adjustable ratios, gain, release and attack times.
And further still, a limiter, and further high pass filter adjustments. Honestly, you couldn’t ask for more customisation, and while the default settings use a pre-configured mixture of all of this, you can tweak it as you see fit.
Recording and Playback
As you can see, I used the same settings in Audacity that I have set in the Windows Audio Preferences panel. Audio files are exported as uncompressed .wav in the same bitrates.
Firstly, I tested, the control buttons, so what you’re hearing is the microphone volume wheel, which sounds like a cat purring, clicking that wheel to mute and unmute a few times, and using the headphone volume when on the right side of the microphone.
This is me typing on a mechanical keyboard and clicking my mouse with the microphone 1ft to the right of my monitor.
This is me reading a blurb from the NZXT review guide, with no background noise.
Reading the same blurb, but this time with loud simulated restaurant ambient background noise, and honestly, it did a remarkable job of picking up very little of that background noise and keeping my voice clear.
