NZXT sponsored this video today to talk about their new relay audio solution
it's a full stack solution for your computer you got your headphone stand
the most important part your speakers your subwoofer and the headphones
their new relay lineup is absolutely named as it's all about working together
and handing off your audio you can switch from your headphones to your
speakers by just putting them on the stand but get out but a chain is only as
strong as its weakest link and I'm hoping that nothing here is going to be weak because they sponsored it let's
start with the relay gaming headset the headphones cover 20 Hertz to 40
kilohertz they got less than one percent total harmonic Distortion the microphone
is 100 Hertz to 10 kilohertz and also
less than one percent uh total harmonic Distortion we have DTS headphone X which
is a surround audio solution kind of like Dolby Atmos but it's from DTS you
might have heard of DTS X for like some of your home theater setups this is just
the headphone version inside the box we have our
gaming headset there it is look at that but I'm getting ahead of myself
look inside and see what kind of goodies
we have we got a nice braided three and a half millimeter combo Jack for your
combo headphone microphone Jack with an inline microphone and a volume adjust
there's a switch right there for mute and unmute and a short clip the shirt
clip feels a little flimsy not gonna lie you also have a splitter for your
headphone and microphone inputs and what is this oh a USB adapter
and ah yes a removable boom ARM with a what
looks to be like a two and a half millimeter I love a removable boom mic
because that means that you can actually just kind of take these out as normal
headphones you don't have to walk around with a stupid boom mic making everyone
know you're a gamer now people will only suspect you're a gamer
you'll notice that this is an adapter not a wireless dongle that's because
these are wired headphones which is great for keeping costs down we have
adjustable ear cups uh they're stepped
though the stepping is not very rigid we also have tilt on the ear cups but no
swivel that means they won't turn this way they only go up and down uh swivel
would have been nice it's made of a metal we have aluminum probably here the
top of the headset is plastic with a plastic leather on the inside with a
relatively plush cushion that feels something like a memory foam the ear
cups are also made of that same plastic leather and on the inside you have your
right and left designations cool I mean I guess I might as well give
them a try in terms of fit and feel they're pretty comfortable on the head
if you have a larger head you might have some problems I have a medium to large
head and the clamping force on the sides a little tight for my liking so your
mileage may vary and they're a very light headphone which is great for
longer listening sessions or gaming sessions the memory foam that they give
you it's a lot of cushion so it uh I
wouldn't be too worried about the Comfort on this isolation wise they seem to block out a
decent amount of sound just passively they don't have any form of active noise
cancellation in the headset so passive is all you get but they seem to be doing
a good job I hope I'm not yelling too loud we'll get to listening to these in
a moment but I want to take a look at their speakers so these are their relay
speakers we have high dynamic range gaming speakers with premium
resonance-free Cabinetry and a universal connectivity
um Universal huh I wonder what they mean by that the outer dimensions of the
speaker are 4.5 by 7.3 by 5.9 inches so
pretty small their total harmonic Distortion is less than 5.5 percent
their frequency response is 70 Hertz to 20 kilohertz not the deepest speakers so
these will probably not sound that great unless paired with a subwoofer which
NZXT conveniently sells and 80 Watts
maximum 40 Watts average for power draw they are powered speakers which means
you don't need like a receiver or anything to power them they'll just plug into the wall and power themselves they
have three inch glass fiber drivers combined with a 20 millimeter silk Dome
and high-end construction that's the two big features on the back let's take a
look
oh look at that inside an unmarked brown box we have
power cable speaker wire power supply
and RCA and 3.5 millimeter cables
there are very small speakers but I always prefer it when they have the
power supply integrated I Don't Need Another Brick under my desk some
concessions had to be made to make these fit on more desks speaking of which
let's take a look at the back of them the right one has nothing on it the left
one this is where the action's at we have
our outputs to the left speaker we have our power button oh that does not press
it as far as I wanted it to I was sorry to get a big chunk we have our volume
knob RCA inputs or TRS input and DC in
they have some ports on the back of both of them to help with the bass response
on them and no speaker grilles so you better
like the idea of bear drivers and there's a light on the front
and since these only go down to 70 Hertz we will need a subwoofer this subwoofer
is not that big which is again a
concession to allow it in more spaces and it's not always a bad thing you can
have pretty great sound out of pretty small speakers
this is a low end extension 140 watt
subwoofer with a 6.5 inch down firing speaker
and a big chunky port on the end
when do they have the knife bit set for the LTT screwdriver
lttstore.com power cable oh no oh wait no we're good
thank God I was gonna be really mad if they included another power brick I was
gonna be not happy but we're good
and RCB take a look at that take a look at that
big old speaker pretty slick pretty subtle it's not
going to be offending anybody in your house or it's not going to ruin your Decor as you saw on the box
we have our volume
our crossover adjustment and their phase
adjustment here's what I don't get on the subwoofer
they have crossover Min and Max
what just tell me what the crossover point is just tell me the hurts we're
about 50 volume on it
uh Color Me impressed these are sold separately from the subwoofer so I do
want to take a listen without the subwoofer on
out of the box these Dukes sounded like a little bit kind of bloated in the bass
they're really pushing the base it's a lot for such a small driver the
subwoofer helps with that a lot I have yet to adjust the Crossovers and Fiddle
with that stuff but out of the gate they sound fine they're
not exactly detailed and I think at max volume I heard a little bit of
uh Distortion I think like like we were almost blowing the speakers out if you
don't like the sound good thing you're just on your computer so you can EQ the
crap out of these to make them sound however you want enter XT also says that
in their software they have an EQ but it might not work for this because we're
only plugged in through this Jack it might be with their USB audio which
these don't have and thank you NZXT for using just standard audio connectors
that makes these way more flexible damn they're very they're very very loud for
the size apparently they could be heard across the studio there's a song by Big
Krit called my sub part 3 which I always use is a great test to tell how low
speakers can actually go because it just sounds like crickets if you don't
actually have a subwoofer after listening to like a proper low very sub
bass heavy track you do see that these lack a little bit of impact because they
only go down to 40 Hertz as opposed to the 20 Hertz region which is where you
feel the rumble like in your chest that's at the very bottom of our hearing
for most music you're probably going to be fine but if you really really care about that low theatrical Rumble these
speakers won't get you there but if you care about your neighbors then they
should do just fine or if you hate them because they're also loud how does the
headset sound I threw it over here there's one way to
find out but before we listen to that let's get the coolest part of this whole
package the switch mix what this is is
like a combo headphone stand a DAC thing that will allow you to seamlessly
switch between your headphones and your speakers
oh look at that that's pretty neat this is a lot of foam in here
look
it's just the one thing
here's the really cool thing about is that a fork it was
got it I need to clean up the really cool thing about this is that they're
not trying to lock you into their NZXT ecosystem this will work with any
headphones because it's just a little button on the top they have the little
they have a little cable routed in here
so you can have it come out to the back that's a cute little place to store that
it can come out the side or it can come up the back we can have
it come out the back because that's where the headphone input is that's actually kind of nice so there's these
little there's all these little circles classic and zxt circles
um they're famous for their circles truly in the front you can have your
headphones then you just hang them like that when
you're using your speakers USBC to usba editor put that in as jarringly as
possible okay okay I'm gonna try and Route it so
it looks a little clean and then we got our speaker input that we're gonna get
in there it would be cool if they also released another version of this where you could have it hanging under your
desk and it would do the same thing and then you could just run all your cables
under the desk that would be NZXT that's the next one okay that's the next thing
you make you don't make anything else till you make that you stop what you're
doing and you make that for me I will buy it
yeah that's it works great and it's it's
playing in here other features you can adjust the volume of your headset and
speakers with the knob touch to mute you have a voice and game slider for your
audio to get your audio sources voice also apparently detects uh your browser
so you can actually mix your browser audio too oh my God and it remembers the
levels between each setting which is awesome so you're never going to accidentally blast your ears
right because it has the settings
it didn't change it
well I I tricked it there I did get it once but no one's using it like that
um that was kind of weird did you see that so one thing is that it seems that the
switch the switch is a little bit faster than the uh the volume
see it goes oh we're full let's talk about
the audio on the headphones the audio on the gaming headset is surprise surprise
tuned for gaming so we have a big lift in the highs so we can hear the details
say like crackles and footsteps so that you can hear your opponents when they're
coming towards you as well as a bit of a boost in the bass to add to that kind of
thrill you're now listening to me through the headset microphone of the
NZXT relay and looking at our Target curve we can see that uh well things
deviate pretty badly above 1000 Hertz and Below 50 hertz luckily you have an
EQ that allows you to adjust the sound to hopefully remedy any issues you have
with the profile microphone response however is relatively flat and I mean
you can hear the sample now I hope it sounds good to you the best part about
this ecosystem is that you're not locked in in any way you could get this and not
have the speakers you can just get this and this is actually so sick another great feature
is that this is a combo Jack at the front so if you have something like nzxt's capsule mini microphone you can
just plug that in and it's already going to work and integrate with the system what would be nice
is if they had maybe an extra input I will say that much an extra input on the
front so you could have a separate microphone and a separate headphone go
in there instead of having to use a combonifier a combo Jack would have been
a nice addition this is also a great feature for clutter bugs like me because
it forces you to have to put your headphones away you actually have to put
them on the stand or else the speakers will not play I need this in my life in
the NZXT software with the switch mix you have some different audio profiles
that are tuned via DTS there is a side tone adjustment as well as
RGB you can adjust the little lights in there oh here we go custom EQ under DTS
custom EQ you get a one two three four five six seven eight nine ten band
graphic EQ uh you have some presets you
have a surround sound effect ooh front wide and traditional
interesting what is traditionally surround so yeah as we thought the EQ
only applies to the headphones but you can EQ your whole computer let's
check out this DTS surround I've never been blown away with headphone surround
audio this does a fine job though
it's if it's a feature that you love I encourage you to use it having dtsx is
great but I am not moved the headphones are
going to run you a hundred dollars the speakers are going to run you 250 and
the headphone DAC and
130 and let's not forget about the sub which is going to run you
150. I'm going to be frank I came in here with pretty low expectations and I
am rather impressed thanks for watching if you liked this video send it to your
friends if you didn't like it send it to your enemies uh why don't you watch
another video of ours it's about the Sony speaker that's very very loud and
Dan did it