The BlackShark V3 Pro is packed with features, but suffers from some audio distortion and a lackluster microphone. It's a solid gaming headset, but it's not the endgame headset you're looking for.
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Razer's BlackShark V2 Pro (2023) is one of my favorite gaming headsets ever. It's comfortable, sounds great, and it has a fantastic microphone. But it was still missing a couple of features that I wanted — namely, simultaneous 2.4GHz wireless and Bluetooth connectivity, so pesky things like phone calls or the sudden impulse to scroll through TikTok don't disrupt my gaming flow. When I asked PR at Razer if the company would ever consider implementing this feature, they said "no promises," and cited battery concerns as the reason. But it appears Razer's gotten over that concern, as its latest flagship headset, the Razer BlackShark V3 Pro, features simultaneous 2.4GHz wireless and Bluetooth connectivity, as well as active noise cancellation — and still gets up to 70 hours of battery life.
The BlackShark V3 Pro is a circumaural wireless gaming headset that's really aimed at premium gamers. Like its predecessors, it doesn't pretend to be a lifestyle headset at all: Its earcups don't swivel flat, and it features a sleek but very "headset" design with wire steel yokes, a prominent volume knob, and a large, detachable boom microphone. Design-wise, it's pretty similar to the BlackShark V2 Pro (2023) — sleek, black, and surprisingly comfortable. And it's much more versatile, with four forms of connectivity (2.4GHz wireless, Bluetooth, USB-C, and analog), plus ANC, and the ability to mix audio from more than one input. These features don't come cheap, however; the $250 BlackShark V3 Pro is on the pricier end — and it might be moving too far away from the line's "elite gamers only" philosophy.
Design and Comfort of the BlackShark V3 Pro
The BlackShark V3 Pro is an over-ear (circumaural) wireless gaming headset with a detachable boom microphone. It looks very similar to the BlackShark V2 Pro (2023) , with plastic earcups, thin, steel wire yokes, and a leatherette headband with fabric-covered foam padding. It features an all-black colorway, which makes it look sleek and premium despite being made mostly of plastic and some sort of stretchy, sporty sweat-wicking (I assume) fabric. The headset also comes in a white colorway, which still has black fabric on the headband and earcups, as well as black wires and a black boom mic.
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The headset is heavier than its predecessor, weighing 12.96 ounces (367g). This isn't too much of an issue, as it's still very comfortable, but I can definitely feel the difference between the BlackShark V3 Pro and the BlackShark V2 Pro (2023), whic weighs 320g . The earcups swivel, tilt, and are height-adjustable; unlike most headsets, the earcups themselves slide down the yokes (instead of the yokes moving). Because the earcups slide on the yokes, they are not locked in place in any way — this isn't an issue when the headset is on your head, but they can sometimes slide out of place when you're taking it off, and I found that minorly frustrating. Also, while the earcups swivel (the earcups on the V2 Pro didn't really swivel at all), they still don't swivel flat, so this is not really a headset that's easy to travel with.
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The headset has replaceable magnetic speaker plates — similar to the higher-end of SteelSeries' Arctis Nova series, such as the Arctis Nova Pro and the Arctis Nova 7 — but at the moment Razer doesn't sell any replacement plates separately. The company did, however, send me some custom speaker plates with the LA Thieves' logo. I naturally wondered if this was some sort of Triple-A team I hadn't heard of; turns out it's a Call of Duty eSports team. (Sorry, guys, I'm a real-life sports person.) Razer's site says other designs are "coming soon," but it looks like you'll only be able to buy the full headset with custom plates — not the custom plates themselves (at least, not yet). This definitely has the potential to be a cool feature, but we'll have to see what the eventual options are.
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