Glorious GHS Wireless InfinitePlay headset review: Battery-swapping has never been better

It's no easy task to break into the world of gaming accessories as a newer brand. While some giants like Sony and Logitech have big fan bases, there are also plenty of smaller gaming-specific brands with long lineages, from Razer to SteelSeries. Glorious is a far newer beast, founded in 2014 and with a heavy focus on PC accessories.

It's branched out into headsets in the last couple of years, though, and finally has a high-end flagship in the form of the GHS Wireless InfinitePlay. I've had my hands on it for over a month, and have run the rule over it in real detail, to see whether it could disrupt the established hierarchy of headset makers. So how does it fare among the best gaming headsets?

Price and Availability

The GHS Wireless InfinitePlay can be ordered directly from Glorious, with stock likely to trickle through to other retailers imminently. As mentioned, this is a high-end headset in Glorious' own terms, although it's lower-cost than some other flagships I've tested.

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It comes in at £199.99 here in the UK and $229.99 in the US, which leaves it in a quite interesting window in the market. At that price most of its competition don't offer a base station of its sort – but equally, much of that competition does have active noise-cancelling (ANC).

Design and Features

Glorious has kept things pretty safe when it comes to the GHS Wireless InfinitePlay's design, and I think that's almost certainly the right call. The main headset is a simple enough thing to look at, although it conceals some smart design choices.

Each earcup comes with a good amount of cushioning, and the headband has a semi-hidden strap system that suspends some of its weight, making it nice and comfortable for long sessions in my testing.

One earcup has a volume dial, while the other has a more multipurpose one – letting you turn the headset on and off, but also balancing its chat/audio mix.

Those lovely dials are metal, which makes them different from the rest of the headset, which is mostly plastic. This keeps the weight down, at 360g, but it does mean that it feels a cut below more premium alternatives.

There's also a mute button and a Bluetooth pairing button (swapping between Bluetooth mode and the 2.4Ghz connection).

The right earcup also houses the removable boom microphone. This is the first duff note – it's made of a sort of flexible plastic, but doesn't flex all that well and is frankly fiddly to position correctly. The material means you'll need to do this each time you remove it, too.

The other big inclusion is a swappable battery, also in the right earcup. Fair play to Glorious here – this is the best implementation of such a system I've ever tested.

Rather than requiring you to open a panel and pry out a battery (like in SteelSeries' case), you simply push on the spring-loaded battery and it pops out, before you slot in the replacement. Crucially, that replacement is symmetrical in its power pins, so you don't have to worry about getting it the right way around.

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To make this system even more impressive, each battery gives a huge 85 hours of play before needing to be swapped. The cherry on top is that the headset has an internal battery in addition, with around three hours of reserve charge so that you don't lose audio after 10 seconds like most of the competition. This makes the battery-swapping system pressure-free and genuinely so slick to interact with.

It's clear that Glorious' aim with this headset is to provide an approximation of the flagship experience, but at a substantial discount, meaning the box has to come with extras. The first, as is logical, is a base station that houses your spare battery, charging it when docked.

That station also has a slot for the included 2.4GHz USB-C dongle (handy since it lets you separate them if desired). There's a USB-A adaptor, too, so you're covered from all angles. That said, it's worth knowing that, like almost every headset out there, this won't work with Xbox consoles at present – but PlayStation, Switch and PC are all covered.

Finally, Glorious' software solution Core lets you customise quite a few elements of the headset's sound, including microphone gain, custom EQs, sidetone and more – including different settings for game audio and chat audio. It's functional and a welcome layer of customisation for those who want it.

Sound and Performance

Glorious has managed to pack a lot of features into a headset without inflating the price too badly, which means I was really curious about how it would perform in sonic terms.

Luckily, from a sheer audio quality standpoint, I'm impressed – the GHS Wireless InfinitePlay is a great headset that won't let you down when it comes to immersive or competitive play. I got through a lot of Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Resynced, but also hours of Battlefield 6 for comparison.

In both cases, the spatiality of the sound was well preserved, leaving me able to hear cues and environmental details with a good amount of precision. There's also plenty of oomph, with really high volumes possible, and good amounts of bass by default.

There's one big omission in the GHS Wireless InfinitePlay's array of features, though – active noise-cancelling (ANC). So long as it's well-implemented, this can help hugely with immersion, so it's a shame not to see it here – although keeping the price down makes it easy to see why it's absent.

There is some noise-cancelling on the microphone, but I didn't find it all too brilliant. As well as being tough to adjust physically, the microphone was extremely sensitive straight out of the box, and picked up my breathing to a distracting degree for teammates. This was adjustable in software, but I suspect many people don't bother with that layer, so there's a small warning.

Still, the real meat of a gaming headset's performance is in its sound, and I'm impressed at what Glorious delivers at this price. That's even more the case when it comes to that battery system, which had me basically forgetting I'd ever need to swap one out. The 85 hours on a single charge is stunning stuff, even before the swappability feature's considered!

Verdict

Glorious has taken on a tough task in breaking down the order of things in the headset world – but its first take on a higher-end option is an impressive warning shot for bigger brands.

The GHS Wireless InfinitePlay headset's design is 'safe' but extremely effective, with great comfort levels and visual flair. Meanwhile, its battery life and swap system are best-in-class and outperform far more expensive rivals.

The sound is extremely solid, too, but there are a couple of letdowns. Including ANC would be a huge win if it didn't spike the price much, while the microphone lets the side down in both sound and design terms.

Overall, given the GHS Wireless InfinitePlay's asking price, this headset feels like a really great option in many areas. If you can forego ANC but want the best battery system then this one's a total winner.

Also Consider

The obvious major competitor is SteelSeries' own swappable-battery headset, the Arctis Nova Pro Omni (our reigning champion in our best gaming headset buyer's guide). Despite shorter battery life, SteelSeries wins out on sound quality and design, for me, but it's way pricier – ANC seals the deal, and if you have a bigger budget, it's the obvious choice.

If you want to stay below £/$200, I'd take a look at the Razer BlackShark V2 Pro, a wireless headset that keeps things much simpler with just a dongle to worry about, and which has a far more industrial design. It feels more premium than Glorious' effort, but has a slimmer array of features as a compromise.