Razer, our relationship about audio products has been a bit tumultuous.
But Razer, I'm ready to give you another try.
With the Razer Moray, as in the eel, or thatsa.
This is a little bit different from some of the offerings that we've seen from Razer in the past.
It's a pair of IEMs. Look at that, there's just little guys.
But Razer isn't calling these a pair of gaming IEMs. They're calling them streaming IEMs,
which is a bit of a weird category that I've never really heard of.
I mean, yes, streaming exists. But the question is, what makes these
specifically for streaming? And is that gonna result in a good headphone?
And presented nicely in the phone, we have the Razer IEMs, as well as their Triskellion logo.
They're not wireless earbuds. They are just wired.
Fun fact, your wingspan is about the same as your height. And the rest of the stuff in the box
comes a nice little carrying case. We have like a leatherette.
Very, very structured, very sturdy.
As well as accessories. It comes with a carabiner,
in case you're the kind of person who likes keeping your valuables on the outside of your bag.
And a reusable cable tie. And in the accessories bit, we have three sizes of silicone ear tips
and three sizes of foam ear tips. I am going to switch these to the small ear tips.
I tend to like foam, but I'm gonna try the silicone ones out today. It's always great to include a variety of ear tips
because it helps people find a proper seal and make sure that the earbuds fit more people.
But while we have the ear tips off, why don't we take a look at the drivers?
It is quite a shape. Like, look at that.
Definitely not like your average set of earbuds.
The ear tips are made of a piano gloss black plastic.
They're very, very lightweight. And they have a recessed MMCX connector.
But this kind of recess could cause compatibility issues
if you have other cables. One thing I appreciate is that the nozzle size for this
is not too big, as a man with narrow canals. I get worried when I see a headphone
with really, really big nozzles. And the cable itself that it comes with
is actually pretty nice. I would just stuff these in my pockets
so it's a relatively tangle resistant cable. But it has a lot of cable memory.
Like you can still see that it's bent and wiggly from when it was in the box.
And there's no inline microphone, which is weird because it's a streaming headphone.
I guess the idea is that you're a streamer, you're gonna have a better microphone already.
But it hurts the versatility of these. Like even $20 ear pods have good microphones on them.
And this just feels like a glaring omission on Razer's parts. Oh, I also didn't mention that, look at that.
It's a 90 degree termination.
I feel like they're underselling it as a pouch. This is a case.
That's firm. These are dual driver ear buds. They contain one dynamic driver and one balanced armature.
The impedance is 32 ohms. The sensitivity is 106 decibels.
And the frequency response is from 20 Hertz to 24,000 Hertz.
Thanks to the very strange shape, these actually fit really nicely into my ears.
And because they're so light, they actually feel really, really comfortable.
Oh, head shot. Yeah, they stay in really good.
They're pretty, they're in there. You can tell that Razer has a couple of goals.
One, to make it non-fatiguing, something that you can listen to for a long time, and to make a streaming headphone,
something that will accentuate human voices. And the way they've tuned these,
I think they kind of hit the mark. There's a lot of like presence in the treble,
which is like really not what I'd expect from a gaming company.
Gaming forward companies that make audio products tend to really love just motion everything up
with way too much bass. And Razer's quite reserved here.
But that kind of makes sense. If the whole point of these is that you're supposed to be monitoring your own voice or having conversations
with other people, but I'm really just surprised with the maturity that Razer has brought to these.
This doesn't have spatial audio gimmicks. This doesn't have a bunch of weird, dumb features
that just destroy the sound quality. Razer's kind of figuring it out.
Let's compare these to our target response curve. Looking at the measurement of our Razer Moray,
that's the green line, against our target curve, the dotted line, we can see that the bass is slightly lacking
and the treble is noticeably overemphasized. This makes the overall sound profile forward,
as in like it almost kind of feels like those at higher instruments are closer to you.
Razer claims that these earbuds can provide up to 36
decibels of isolation. So a 36 decibel decrease in the loudness of something,
which is true looking at this chart, if we're only talking about 20 kilohertz
and five and a half kilohertz. If we're talking full frequency attenuation,
it's not that great. We see very little attenuation in the bass
and sub bass regions, which is completely normal for non A and C headphones.
And very good isolation at the top. Again, normal.
But just saying 36 decibel noise isolation is meaningless because there's such a huge spectrum of noise
and it's gonna be literally impossible to cut all of that out. Even the best full frequency earplugs
can't attenuate that well. Razer's released a solid pair of IEMs that I think
bring a lot of maturity that I haven't really seen from the brand. The biggest misses are really just
the no inline microphone. The tuning, you might not be to your tastes,
but you can always EQ that if you like. But none of that matters if the price is wrong.
And that price is. 130 USD, which is actually a fairly relaxed razor tax.
I think that's a pretty fair price for these. If you're like me and you like the headphones that I like,
I think you might actually enjoy these. And I think they're at a pretty reasonable price.
For IEMs in this price segment, things are super competitive right now.
So make sure to look around at all of your options before pulling the trigger on anything.
Thanks so much for watching ShortCircuit. If you're a streamer looking for a pair of cans,
why don't you check out our video on the Audio Technica ATH M50Xs.
The pretty dang goo.