Recently, I was browsing Twitter when I noticed our friends at Corsair dropped a tweet about becoming Discord Certified. Some people responded to this tweet asking what the hell Discord Certification even means.

Well, Dipp, let me tell you just what we’re doing over here.

Discord Certification

I asked Jared, our Quality Assurance specialist who drives the certification process, what’s the point? Why do we do certification?

“I play games. I want to play with friends. Seeing Discord Certification on something tells me I can use that product to play that game, talk with my friends, and have a good experience throughout.”

Ultimately, we want to establish the audio quality of the product and understand how it interacts with Discord. We also judge the product on some qualitative points like how comfortable it is and how it interacts with popular games.

The Process

First, we took a mannequin head and hollowed the inside. We’ll call him Manny.

Manny, now with many holes, is then placed on top of a professional studio-quality microphone.

The headset is then placed on Manny covering his ear holes. A previously recorded control sample is then pumped through Discord and out of the headset. This is recorded on the studio microphone.

Similarly, if the headset has an attached microphone we will test it by pumping audio through Discord and into the mic.

Both the recordings are then compared to the previously recorded control sample to understand how things sound. We’re looking to make sure that the audio is fresh and squeaky clean when using the headset. Any issues and we’ll ding the score.

Playing With Games

After the audio test is complete, we spend time playing games with the headset. Generally, we pick the current top five or so games on Twitch as the games to demo with. This makes sure we have a constantly updating and rotating game list to test against.

Quality Beyond Sound

Obviously, we want to make sure that the headset plays well with Discord and doesn’t break anything. If there’s a fundamental setup issue or usability issue with the product we’ll ding the score.

Sometimes headsets break other games which can lower scores. One example is a headset which crashed Street Fighter V if you unplugged it while playing. We dinged this particular products score.

How comfortable a headset is also factors into the score. Some scores have gotten knocked down a bit since they were not comfortable to wear for a long period of time.

Report

After that, we wrap up all the feedback and send it off with a report to the company we’re working with. If they passed our tests, they’re Discord certified!

Basically, the Discord certification process is designed to make sure you, as a consumer, have some more information when purchasing gear to game with. We want to make sure you have pre-qualified options.

For the headset manufacturers reading, feel free to request certification by emailing getcertified@discordapp.com. It’s completely free, no cost on your end.

For those curious, here’s our current running list of Discord Certified headsets.

Below is a sample five page report that we would send to a manufacturer after testing their product.

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