The HyperX Cloud 2s have been a go-to recommendation
for us for a long time. Why? Because they're reasonably priced
and they sound pretty good, at least in the realm of gaming headsets.
Now, they're doing a very iterative update
to the HyperX Cloud 3s. Before we take a look at these,
we will take a look at what's in the box. What's in the box?
What's in the box? Well, what's on the box? Signature comfort, legendary sound.
We have DTS-X. It's like Dolby Atmos. It's a surround sound solution,
but it's cheaper to license and in some ways is a better technology.
It's got memory foam. It's got durable metal. It's got angled 53 millimeter drivers
and it has an ultra clear microphone, which is very important for gaming.
When you got to talk to your friends and make sure that they hear you. Oh, okay.
One thing to note, the DTS headphone X spatial audio
is only available on PC, probably because it will be enabled
through their software suite rather than on the headphone themselves.
We got the headphones out of the box already and then we got a box in here.
What's another box? We have our boom microphone ARM
and our USB dongle. A nice braided cable, pretty soft.
It's a five foot cable, but it is a, oh wow, look at that.
Oh, that's in there. It's a five foot USB-C to three and a half millimeter
headphone adapter and they conveniently include
this little guy. And that's about it.
That's all of the stuff that you get. On the headphones themselves, we have another like a five foot braided cable.
Sadly, it's non-removable, which is a big bummer. It just sucks.
Why did, why make this adapter when you could just make two cables that plug into here?
It's nice to be able to replace cables as they often are some of the first things to go
on a headset that you'll have for a long time. Hopefully you'll have these for a long time.
The left of your cup, we have the input for your microphone, a mute switch on the back.
And on the right ear cup, we have a volume knob. I'm not sure if that's going to control your system volume
or if it will have any other features. It doesn't even press in. That's very simple, very basic.
The headband is made of that memory foam that they mentioned on the front.
And the ear cups also have memory foam. And we have a full metal headband,
as well as these metal arms on the edge that will keep everything nice and sturdy.
Seems pretty durable, perhaps a little weak there.
It's a nice pleather texture on here. It is very much still faux leather.
Are the ear cups removable? And yes, they are, which is great. There are companies that produce third party ear cups
so you can replace them if you don't like these ones or if you want maybe a slightly different sound.
And on the inside, we see all of their trade markings
and stuff like that. And we can see the drivers themselves. And they're really just, the drivers really just exposed.
We got 53 millimeter neodymium drivers.
Pretty typical for this kind of product segment. These, as you may have noticed,
since the cable is not removable, are not wireless headphones, which is totally fine.
This is a budget kind of category. And they're pretty squarely focused on being for gaming
at home rather than on the go. The ear cups, they have a tilt
and a very, very slight amount of swivel
to ups and the downs. It's tough to say if they're super comfortable
because I haven't had a chance to wear them for a long time. Now, I don't have a huge head,
but I also don't have a small head. I'm upper medium.
I'm like, within one standard deviation of the mean, but like near that standard deviation.
Many headsets, when they're fully extended, I can't comfortably wear. They're too loose.
If you have a larger head, you might have to look elsewhere. In terms of comfort around the ear cups,
well, I think that they're probably gonna be a little warm because it's memory foam and pleather.
There's enough space for my ears, though they're not absolutely massive ear cups.
So if you have bigger ears or ears that stick out pretty far,
they're not super deep either. So your mileage may vary. It also comes in their signature red color,
but I actually really appreciate the stealth look. Like these kind of look almost professional in a sense.
Like they look like something you'd see somebody wearing backstage at a show. The microphone is bendy.
Wow, look at that.
Incredible. We good. It recognized that immediately as the HyperX Cloud 3s,
and you can see that there is no RGB. So if you are a fan of the stealth look,
you got a winner, baby. And now we're gonna see how awful their software is.
Typically, it's a gaming headset.
So the software is gonna be garbage.
Sweet, that's how simple it is. It's working, it's functional.
That's the smoothest this has ever gone.
Yeah, a round of applause.
You did the basic thing, I'm proud of you. And I don't wanna sound facetious towards HyperX.
This was actually a really smooth experience. It just works.
Do you need an account for your headphones? No, there's no account.
What? There's no account, it just works. I have the spatial audio, it's gonna be dope.
Okay, maybe it's not so good. Oh, driver's almost installed. We start my computer.
And we are back.
After one quick reboot, we now have the audio device fully installed,
allowing us to take advantage of DTX spatial sound, as well as an equalizer that they have in the settings.
Oh, look at that. The nice thing about this,
God, and the software's actually responsive. It's amazing that I've impressed by this.
It's a menu. But that just shows the sorry state of gaming software.
It comes with multiple EQ presets, as well as a customizable one, two, three, four, five,
six, seven, eight, nine, 10 band EQ.
In the software, you also have the options to turn on or off mic monitoring.
Is this the volume wheel? Actually, it's not actually adjusting the volume.
That's what it's supposed to do, right? It's supposed to be a volume wheel, right?
Don't wanna blast my ears. Wow, the duck song.
I'm glad I took those off. This was as David theorized.
This has an independent volume knob. It does not adjust your Windows volume.
It adjusts the volume of the headset itself. Okay, now I'm gonna give some listening impressions.
Sound wise, they sound pretty good.
They do have a little bit of brightness up in the highs that I find that could be a little bit piercing
for some people, but it's great for gaming where you wanna hear the small details,
like rustling leaves or the footsteps of your enemies. At the bottom, there's a little bit of a bass boost,
but not so much in the sub-bass, so you don't get the biggest amount of rumble,
but you do get enough oomph and thump
from a little bit of a bass increase, but other than that, they seem actually pretty neutral.
In terms of sound stage, well, they're not the widest.
They are closed back headphones, so they're not gonna be super, super wide,
but I was actually pretty impressed with how well things were placed,
at least in terms of listening to music. We'll play some games in just a moment.
Honestly, they're not really coloring the sound a whole lot either, which is kind of cool,
especially at the price that I know that these are gonna be at.
Which is a good price. However, if you turn on the DTSX feature,
it sounds terrible. It makes things sound boomy
and just not really positioned in the right area. You lose a bunch of details.
There's kind of a weird random reverb to everything. It just doesn't know what to do with it,
and that's kind of the case for any sort of spatial audio solution
that isn't receiving a proper spatial input.
I was just listening to normal stereo tracks, so it was just kind of really trying hard to place stuff,
and it was doing a terrible job. The nice thing is that you also get that EQ in it,
so if there's anything that you don't really like about it, you can pretty easily adjust it.
Listening to very complex tracks, the details of instruments and vocals might not always shine through.
This isn't exactly the most detail-oriented headphone
out there, but I'm still gonna call it pretty good.
But what does the robot say? Measuring the headphones on our fake human head,
we can see our frequency response curve. The dotted line is our target curve,
and the green line is how these measure. Just because something deviates from the target curve
doesn't make it bad, but our target curve is designed
so that it represents what the majority of people will like in a headphone.
And there's always a million other things about headphones that you may or may not like,
and also, every headphone will sound different on your head.
You are not a standardized robot. You're a special, unique individual.
Looking here, we can see that there is that bump in the bass as well as a little bit of a drop in the sub-bass.
The mids, though, it says pretty consistent, along with our target, meaning it will sound relatively neutral.
The upper mids, there's a little bit of a dip and a spikiness, especially at the six kilohertz region,
which could be a little bit harsh or fatiguing,
but it's really not that bad. It's pretty well-controlled in the treble
for this kind of headphone, and it's not doing any of the aggressive deep V-tuning
that a lot of gaming headphones like to do or cheaper mainstream headphones.
So it's not bad. You're now listening to me on the microphone
of the HyperX Cloud 3s. Looking at the microphone curve,
we can see a pretty flat response, which is exactly what we're looking for.
Remember, this is a compensated curve, unlike the headphone curve, which is raw.
We want a perfectly flat line in this scenario. There's a big dip just above the 10 kilohertz region,
which is a little bit above where you hear most speech,
things like S's and T's might be a little bit dampened,
but you shouldn't hear too profound of an effect on it. And you can see that there's a bit of a scoop up
at the bottom where the bass is, though very, very low,
and typically out of the range of the human voice. But the downside to that is that it could introduce
some rumbles from, say, trucks outside or like an AC unit working.
That could kind of affect the sound.
Other than that, it's pretty flat. What do you guys think it sounds like?
Oh, and can you hear the keyboard when I'm talking? I'm typing really hard.
Let's play some games. Do you have any games on your laptop?
OK.
Yeah, OK, so the DTSX spatial audio thing
doesn't happen at the game level. It happens at the driver level.
So it's just kind of applying a weird filter to all of the sounds.
And running around in cyberpunk with DTSX on
sounded like a little bit more exciting and spacious.
But then I realized that sounds weren't really coming from where they were located.
And once I turned off DTS, it actually sounded better.
This is one of the issues with the way that spatial audio is basically implemented and or not
implemented by a lot of developers is that there's no one way for everybody
to do spatial audio that doesn't require some sort of weird middleman like Dolby or DTS.
Dolby especially sucks because basically all that Dolby does is charge really, really high prices
for all of their licensing. And then they advertise really hard
and that makes everything more expensive. Hey, I guess it's a feature that you get.
And for the price, which is $100,
you're not doing that bad. It's the same as the last price HyperX Cloud 2s.
So great, there's been no bump in price, though this is a pretty marginal upgrade
from what I've seen with both of them. While I haven't listened to the HyperX Cloud 2s recently,
they, these both look the same. They feel the same and they don't really offer more features.
I mean, even the HyperX Cloud 2 had that cool neck dongle
that allowed you to change the volume and stuff. You don't get any of that here. It's all on the headset.
Maybe that's just preference, but it should be noted that you can get the HyperX Cloud 2s for $20 less.
So are these worth it?
Tough to say. They will be once they stop selling the HyperX Cloud 2s,
but there's so many of those out in the world because they're a very popular headset
that I don't think you'll have any trouble finding the HyperX Cloud 2s for a long time.
I think if you're in the market for a $100 headset,
this will not do you wrong. There are some other options like the SteelSeries Arctis Nova 3,
or if you want wireless, you can still get some of the Razer Barracudas,
which I would recommend avoiding because everything I've heard from Razer sounds like dog do.
But if wireless is very important to you, Barracuda might be the way to go.
If you like this, why don't you check out that video with the NZXT Relay lineup of products
where they had a cool little headphone stand that makes it so that your speakers stop
when you put your headphones down. That was pretty cool.