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The HyperX Cloud 2s have been a go-to recommendation

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for us for a long time. Why? Because they're reasonably priced

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and they sound pretty good, at least in the realm of gaming headsets.

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Now, they're doing a very iterative update

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to the HyperX Cloud 3s. Before we take a look at these,

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we will take a look at what's in the box. What's in the box?

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What's in the box? Well, what's on the box? Signature comfort, legendary sound.

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We have DTS-X. It's like Dolby Atmos. It's a surround sound solution,

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but it's cheaper to license and in some ways is a better technology.

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It's got memory foam. It's got durable metal. It's got angled 53 millimeter drivers

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and it has an ultra clear microphone, which is very important for gaming.

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When you got to talk to your friends and make sure that they hear you. Oh, okay.

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One thing to note, the DTS headphone X spatial audio

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is only available on PC, probably because it will be enabled

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through their software suite rather than on the headphone themselves.

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We got the headphones out of the box already and then we got a box in here.

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What's another box? We have our boom microphone ARM

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and our USB dongle. A nice braided cable, pretty soft.

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It's a five foot cable, but it is a, oh wow, look at that.

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Oh, that's in there. It's a five foot USB-C to three and a half millimeter

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headphone adapter and they conveniently include

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this little guy. And that's about it.

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That's all of the stuff that you get. On the headphones themselves, we have another like a five foot braided cable.

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Sadly, it's non-removable, which is a big bummer. It just sucks.

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Why did, why make this adapter when you could just make two cables that plug into here?

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It's nice to be able to replace cables as they often are some of the first things to go

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on a headset that you'll have for a long time. Hopefully you'll have these for a long time.

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The left of your cup, we have the input for your microphone, a mute switch on the back.

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And on the right ear cup, we have a volume knob. I'm not sure if that's going to control your system volume

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or if it will have any other features. It doesn't even press in. That's very simple, very basic.

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The headband is made of that memory foam that they mentioned on the front.

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And the ear cups also have memory foam. And we have a full metal headband,

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as well as these metal arms on the edge that will keep everything nice and sturdy.

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Seems pretty durable, perhaps a little weak there.

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It's a nice pleather texture on here. It is very much still faux leather.

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Are the ear cups removable? And yes, they are, which is great. There are companies that produce third party ear cups

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so you can replace them if you don't like these ones or if you want maybe a slightly different sound.

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And on the inside, we see all of their trade markings

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and stuff like that. And we can see the drivers themselves. And they're really just, the drivers really just exposed.

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We got 53 millimeter neodymium drivers.

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Pretty typical for this kind of product segment. These, as you may have noticed,

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since the cable is not removable, are not wireless headphones, which is totally fine.

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This is a budget kind of category. And they're pretty squarely focused on being for gaming

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at home rather than on the go. The ear cups, they have a tilt

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and a very, very slight amount of swivel

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to ups and the downs. It's tough to say if they're super comfortable

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because I haven't had a chance to wear them for a long time. Now, I don't have a huge head,

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but I also don't have a small head. I'm upper medium.

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I'm like, within one standard deviation of the mean, but like near that standard deviation.

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Many headsets, when they're fully extended, I can't comfortably wear. They're too loose.

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If you have a larger head, you might have to look elsewhere. In terms of comfort around the ear cups,

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well, I think that they're probably gonna be a little warm because it's memory foam and pleather.

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There's enough space for my ears, though they're not absolutely massive ear cups.

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So if you have bigger ears or ears that stick out pretty far,

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they're not super deep either. So your mileage may vary. It also comes in their signature red color,

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but I actually really appreciate the stealth look. Like these kind of look almost professional in a sense.

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Like they look like something you'd see somebody wearing backstage at a show. The microphone is bendy.

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Wow, look at that.

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Incredible. We good. It recognized that immediately as the HyperX Cloud 3s,

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and you can see that there is no RGB. So if you are a fan of the stealth look,

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you got a winner, baby. And now we're gonna see how awful their software is.

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Typically, it's a gaming headset.

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So the software is gonna be garbage.

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Sweet, that's how simple it is. It's working, it's functional.

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That's the smoothest this has ever gone.

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Yeah, a round of applause.

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You did the basic thing, I'm proud of you. And I don't wanna sound facetious towards HyperX.

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This was actually a really smooth experience. It just works.

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Do you need an account for your headphones? No, there's no account.

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What? There's no account, it just works. I have the spatial audio, it's gonna be dope.

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Okay, maybe it's not so good. Oh, driver's almost installed. We start my computer.

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And we are back.

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After one quick reboot, we now have the audio device fully installed,

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allowing us to take advantage of DTX spatial sound, as well as an equalizer that they have in the settings.

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Oh, look at that. The nice thing about this,

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God, and the software's actually responsive. It's amazing that I've impressed by this.

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It's a menu. But that just shows the sorry state of gaming software.

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It comes with multiple EQ presets, as well as a customizable one, two, three, four, five,

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six, seven, eight, nine, 10 band EQ.

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In the software, you also have the options to turn on or off mic monitoring.

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Is this the volume wheel? Actually, it's not actually adjusting the volume.

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That's what it's supposed to do, right? It's supposed to be a volume wheel, right?

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Don't wanna blast my ears. Wow, the duck song.

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I'm glad I took those off. This was as David theorized.

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This has an independent volume knob. It does not adjust your Windows volume.

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It adjusts the volume of the headset itself. Okay, now I'm gonna give some listening impressions.

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Sound wise, they sound pretty good.

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They do have a little bit of brightness up in the highs that I find that could be a little bit piercing

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for some people, but it's great for gaming where you wanna hear the small details,

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like rustling leaves or the footsteps of your enemies. At the bottom, there's a little bit of a bass boost,

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but not so much in the sub-bass, so you don't get the biggest amount of rumble,

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but you do get enough oomph and thump

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from a little bit of a bass increase, but other than that, they seem actually pretty neutral.

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In terms of sound stage, well, they're not the widest.

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They are closed back headphones, so they're not gonna be super, super wide,

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but I was actually pretty impressed with how well things were placed,

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at least in terms of listening to music. We'll play some games in just a moment.

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Honestly, they're not really coloring the sound a whole lot either, which is kind of cool,

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especially at the price that I know that these are gonna be at.

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Which is a good price. However, if you turn on the DTSX feature,

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it sounds terrible. It makes things sound boomy

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and just not really positioned in the right area. You lose a bunch of details.

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There's kind of a weird random reverb to everything. It just doesn't know what to do with it,

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and that's kind of the case for any sort of spatial audio solution

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that isn't receiving a proper spatial input.

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I was just listening to normal stereo tracks, so it was just kind of really trying hard to place stuff,

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and it was doing a terrible job. The nice thing is that you also get that EQ in it,

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so if there's anything that you don't really like about it, you can pretty easily adjust it.

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Listening to very complex tracks, the details of instruments and vocals might not always shine through.

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This isn't exactly the most detail-oriented headphone

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out there, but I'm still gonna call it pretty good.

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But what does the robot say? Measuring the headphones on our fake human head,

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we can see our frequency response curve. The dotted line is our target curve,

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and the green line is how these measure. Just because something deviates from the target curve

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doesn't make it bad, but our target curve is designed

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so that it represents what the majority of people will like in a headphone.

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And there's always a million other things about headphones that you may or may not like,

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and also, every headphone will sound different on your head.

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You are not a standardized robot. You're a special, unique individual.

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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.

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The mids, though, it says pretty consistent, along with our target, meaning it will sound relatively neutral.

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The upper mids, there's a little bit of a dip and a spikiness, especially at the six kilohertz region,

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which could be a little bit harsh or fatiguing,

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but it's really not that bad. It's pretty well-controlled in the treble

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for this kind of headphone, and it's not doing any of the aggressive deep V-tuning

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that a lot of gaming headphones like to do or cheaper mainstream headphones.

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So it's not bad. You're now listening to me on the microphone

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of the HyperX Cloud 3s. Looking at the microphone curve,

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we can see a pretty flat response, which is exactly what we're looking for.

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Remember, this is a compensated curve, unlike the headphone curve, which is raw.

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We want a perfectly flat line in this scenario. There's a big dip just above the 10 kilohertz region,

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which is a little bit above where you hear most speech,

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things like S's and T's might be a little bit dampened,

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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

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at the bottom where the bass is, though very, very low,

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and typically out of the range of the human voice. But the downside to that is that it could introduce

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some rumbles from, say, trucks outside or like an AC unit working.

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That could kind of affect the sound.

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Other than that, it's pretty flat. What do you guys think it sounds like?

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Oh, and can you hear the keyboard when I'm talking? I'm typing really hard.

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Let's play some games. Do you have any games on your laptop?

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OK.

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Yeah, OK, so the DTSX spatial audio thing

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doesn't happen at the game level. It happens at the driver level.

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So it's just kind of applying a weird filter to all of the sounds.

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And running around in cyberpunk with DTSX on

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sounded like a little bit more exciting and spacious.

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But then I realized that sounds weren't really coming from where they were located.

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And once I turned off DTS, it actually sounded better.

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This is one of the issues with the way that spatial audio is basically implemented and or not

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implemented by a lot of developers is that there's no one way for everybody

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to do spatial audio that doesn't require some sort of weird middleman like Dolby or DTS.

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Dolby especially sucks because basically all that Dolby does is charge really, really high prices

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for all of their licensing. And then they advertise really hard

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and that makes everything more expensive. Hey, I guess it's a feature that you get.

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And for the price, which is $100,

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you're not doing that bad. It's the same as the last price HyperX Cloud 2s.

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So great, there's been no bump in price, though this is a pretty marginal upgrade

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from what I've seen with both of them. While I haven't listened to the HyperX Cloud 2s recently,

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they, these both look the same. They feel the same and they don't really offer more features.

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I mean, even the HyperX Cloud 2 had that cool neck dongle

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that allowed you to change the volume and stuff. You don't get any of that here. It's all on the headset.

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Maybe that's just preference, but it should be noted that you can get the HyperX Cloud 2s for $20 less.

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So are these worth it?

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Tough to say. They will be once they stop selling the HyperX Cloud 2s,

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but there's so many of those out in the world because they're a very popular headset

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that I don't think you'll have any trouble finding the HyperX Cloud 2s for a long time.

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I think if you're in the market for a $100 headset,

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this will not do you wrong. There are some other options like the SteelSeries Arctis Nova 3,

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or if you want wireless, you can still get some of the Razer Barracudas,

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which I would recommend avoiding because everything I've heard from Razer sounds like dog do.

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But if wireless is very important to you, Barracuda might be the way to go.

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If you like this, why don't you check out that video with the NZXT Relay lineup of products

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where they had a cool little headphone stand that makes it so that your speakers stop

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when you put your headphones down. That was pretty cool.