Turtle Beach’s new Stealth 700 gaming headset has two USB dongles

Turtle Beach’s redesigned Stealth 700 Gen 3 wireless gaming headset is redefining #donglelife by including two USB transmitters, allowing it to quick-switch across consoles and PC / Steam Deck at the push of a button once it launches on September 22nd — with preorders available now for $199.99.

This isn’t the first headset to try the one-button switching thing, but the new Stealth 700 goes a very different route than Logitech’s pricier Astro A50 X, which routed all audio and video through its charging dock’s HDMI passthrough. The Stealth 700 sounds a little more rudimentary than that (though also much less finicky), but its specs are pretty robust with 60mm drivers that are 10mm larger than the last-gen model, simultaneous Bluetooth 5.2 connectivity for phone / Discord use, spatial audio, a noise-canceling microphone (that apparently uses “AI”), and a claimed 80 hours of battery life.

The dedicated PC model offers higher 24-bit / 96kHz audio and a 16-bit / 32kHz mic, as the current consoles are limited to 16-bit / 48kHz for audio and 16-bit / 16kHz for mics.

Another strange connectivity anomaly is that the Xbox version is cross-compatible with PlayStation / PC, but the PlayStation and PC models don’t work with Xbox (yet the PlayStation model works with PC, and the PC one works on PS5 / PS4). Microsoft and Sony’s proprietary licensing for their respective consoles likely plays a role in that bit of confusion — fun.

Nuanced compatibility restrictions aside, the new Stealth 700 sounds like a simple yet brute force method for a multiplatform gamer to use one headset across systems without constantly moving around a USB receiver or repairing Bluetooth. It’s definitely a little more flexible than the Astro A50 X’s demand that your headset be the central hub for all your systems, especially if your console and PC setups are in different rooms.