Why you don't need an audiophile headset for gaming — comfort, convenience, and a good mic win over pure audio fidelity

"Best gaming headset for audiophiles" is one of the categories on our list of best gaming headsets, and it's easy to look at that and wonder if you shouldn't be looking at just audiophile headsets to begin with. Headsets are mainly about audio, after all, and it does seem to logically follow that audiophile headsets would have the best audio (I mean, it's in the name).

Headsets are mainly about audio, but that doesn't mean that the "objectively" best-sounding headset by audiophile standards translates to the best-sounding headset by gaming standards. Nor does it mean that you should choose your gaming headset based on audio quality at the expense of everything else.

Audiophile headsets, including headphones, are primarily designed around one thing: audio fidelity. In other words, they're designed and tuned to reproduce audio exactly as it was recorded, which is exactly as the artist heard it when they were recording it, and is therefore exactly as the artist intended …